“People are willing to pay; it must be valuable. The alternative is that consumers are making mistakes, and we all know that can’t happen.”
It can actually be both. Value is subjective, and the idea that consumers can’t make mistakes is a gross oversimplification of the way the market selects against mistakes on average, in the long-run.
People are willing to pay for lottery tickets because the possibility of winning a pile of cash for a small investment makes them happier. Whether or not that’s a mistake depends on if there is some other opportunity they could spend their money on that would make them more happy than the lottery ticket. To you and I it would seem obvious that there should be. But both value and happiness are entirely subjective and gambling for entertainment isn’t objectively worse than watching movies or playing computer games or commenting on rationality blogs.
There have been long-term (multiple years of selling tickets between drawings) lotteries in the past. I don’t know of any with randomized drawing times though, so that could be a fun innovation. Pity there’s a government monopoly on lotteries so nobody’s allowed to try it… Waiting for a particular block hash value on the Bitcoin chain or something publicly visible would be a good way to determine drawing time these days actually… Would be pretty easy to set up with a little math.
“People are willing to pay; it must be valuable. The alternative is that consumers are making mistakes, and we all know that can’t happen.”
It can actually be both. Value is subjective, and the idea that consumers can’t make mistakes is a gross oversimplification of the way the market selects against mistakes on average, in the long-run.
People are willing to pay for lottery tickets because the possibility of winning a pile of cash for a small investment makes them happier. Whether or not that’s a mistake depends on if there is some other opportunity they could spend their money on that would make them more happy than the lottery ticket. To you and I it would seem obvious that there should be. But both value and happiness are entirely subjective and gambling for entertainment isn’t objectively worse than watching movies or playing computer games or commenting on rationality blogs.
There have been long-term (multiple years of selling tickets between drawings) lotteries in the past. I don’t know of any with randomized drawing times though, so that could be a fun innovation. Pity there’s a government monopoly on lotteries so nobody’s allowed to try it… Waiting for a particular block hash value on the Bitcoin chain or something publicly visible would be a good way to determine drawing time these days actually… Would be pretty easy to set up with a little math.