The cost of a lottery ticket is a lot more than the jackpot times the likelihood of winning.
In lotteries with rollover jackpots, lottery tickets can become positive expected value… as long as you don’t take into account the possibility of having to split the jackpot with another winner.
But that possibility is present regardless of whether the jackpot accumulates or not, or am I missing something?
Certainly lotteries with an oversized jackpot will sell more tickets, thus increasing the risk, but it doesn’t seem obvious to me that the player pool will increase fast enough to keep the EV down.
Well I suppose that it depends on the rules of that specific lottery, but I suspect that most U.S. state lotteries with large jackpots do split the total prize between all winning tickets. It’s just that the odds of having to split your prize are a lot harder to know than the odds of winning the jackpot at all.
In lotteries with rollover jackpots, lottery tickets can become positive expected value… as long as you don’t take into account the possibility of having to split the jackpot with another winner.
But that possibility is present regardless of whether the jackpot accumulates or not, or am I missing something?
Certainly lotteries with an oversized jackpot will sell more tickets, thus increasing the risk, but it doesn’t seem obvious to me that the player pool will increase fast enough to keep the EV down.
Well I suppose that it depends on the rules of that specific lottery, but I suspect that most U.S. state lotteries with large jackpots do split the total prize between all winning tickets. It’s just that the odds of having to split your prize are a lot harder to know than the odds of winning the jackpot at all.