Someone had suggested an idea along these lines a while ago, and I think it would work better than now:
Lotteries such as Powerball would accomplish more, and generate more interest, by awarding, say, jackpots of $10 million apiece to 50 separate winners rather than having one lucky winner taking a $500 million jackpot.
50 winners generates more interest because that fantasy about drawing the lucky numbers becomes (slightly) more plausible for people who play the lottery. By having 50 winners, you also generate more buzz, because now you have 50 winners who will serve as lottery testimonials rather than just one person. The public would be much more intrigued since it is more believable to think that you will be “one of the lucky 50” than that Lucky One and Only One.
Someone winning $10 million is arguably (nearly) as financially set for life as someone who wins $500 million, anyway, so this system would have much more overall benefit.
In addition, $500 million may be overwhelming, but a $3 million check (which is what might be left of a $10 million jackpot after the lump-sum deduction and taxes are taken out of it) is something far more people can relate to, and would not be mentally overwhelmed by. You might not have people going broke or on crazy sprees. And with 50 winners of a smaller sum, it may be more likely that there would be less blackmail, extortion, fraud, kidnapping of lotto winners, etc.
If it’s a $270 million Powerball, then it would be 27 winners; if it’s an $850 million Powerball, then there would be 85 winners.
I’m not against your plan, but $10 million, while life changing for most people, is a far cry from $500 million in terms of what you can do with it. A good yacht would set you back more than $10 million all by itself, plus you need a crew and a lot of fuel.
Seems like you’re trying to fix a problem that barely exists and might be built on the wrong premise. No one I know really talks about lotteries until they get into the ridiculous range of 9 figures. So I don’t buy the 50 winners of $10 million would generate more interest.
You’ve asserted this as fact, but I think it’s important to establish with evidence that it’s true, because in my opinion it is central to your thesis. I’m not convinced it is true. If I recall correctly when the Powerball recently went to a ridiculously high amount that number had resonance in the media and resulted in a hugely increased interest in the lottery. I’m suspicious about the claim that orders of magnitude less money paired with a negligible, but slightly less negligible, chance of winning will prove to be the more enticing option. Maybe it’s true but I don’t think we should accept that it is as an assertion, because there are plenty of plausible reasons for it not to be true.
I’m also thinking that “overall benefit” is dominated by the revenue brought in by the lottery, and what that can be spent on after prizes and admin are taken into account. Even 50 people is too small a number for the prizes themselves to be considered a significant public benefit.
So maximizing “profit” for the lottery is the essential “overall benefit”. Which leads me to the other main reason I’m skeptical of your plan: I suspect the managers of the lottery are attempting to maximize this, and there is probably enough data out there to guide them to an optimal strategy of balancing payouts versus chances of winning.
In other words, this is a question best answered by math and actuarial tables, not appeals to intuition and social arguments. Show us the math!
Not only that, but the reason that there is a 500 mil jackpot in the first place is because the odds are so long. Shorter odds make much smaller jackpots on the whole.
This. Lotteries like Powerball are based on the idea that the big prize is only awarded to someone who matches all of the drawn numbers (though there are a number of smaller prizes awarded to players who match some of, but not all of, the numbers). It’s a really simple premise right now – if I match every number, I win. That’s it.
If you were to somehow make a rule that establishes that there’d be 50 winners (or whatever), it seems like it’d have to become a complicated rule, which’d potentially decrease interest, instead of increase it.
Big jackpots in any lottery game occur when several drawings in a row result in no winning ticket, and, thus, those huge jackpots are actually the big prize from a number of drawings, rolled together. And. as has been noted, it’s a big absolute jackpot which generates the buzz (and additional play).
For the vast majority of people, I’d argue that both figures are tremendously beyond what they can wrap their heads around. A $3 million check would be just as surreal as a $500 million dollar check.
I am pretty sure it is the exact opposite. The two major US lotteries just changed their probabilities so that each ticket is LESS likely to win and there will be fewer winners. This leads to larger jackpots which draws more people to buy tickets.
People (and groups of people like coworkers) do pay attention to large jackpots and buy more tickets if there is a large jackpot over small ones.
This is absolutely true. The lottery is just kinda background noise unless the jackpot gets really big.
And if you want to have 50x a chance of winning $10M, just get together with 50 of your friends, and each of you chips in one (or 10, or however many) tickets and everyone signs an agreement to divide the proceeds evenly. People do that sort of thing in offices all the time when the jackpots get big.
On a related note, on the few occasions that I play the lottery, I always play the same set of numbers 10 or 20 times. Of course, this reduces my expected payout. But the attraction is the amount by which I would piss off another player who happened to pick the same numbers and share the jackpot - because I would take 90-95% of the money.
Not at all. You just have to adjust the numbers so that you’ll get on average (you don’t always one and only winner in powerball-type lotteries. You can have zero one week and 4 the next week) 50 winners. So, for instance, instead of having to guess 7 numbers out of 50, for instance, you’ll have to guess 6 out of 60, or 7 out of 35, or whatever combination will statistically result in about 50 winners/week. The game isn’t any different.
More people buy tickets when the jackpot gets bigger, it’s a pretty well-documented phenomenon that large prizes attract more money. You are asserting that small prizes would attract more people, but it doesn’t appear to be based on any empirical evidence, the possibility of winning a large prize is what tends to attract people. I know that I personally would always choose traditional Powerball over your variation, because the possibility of winning a lot of money is the thing that actually attracts me to the game. Also there generally ARE other games around with potential payouts from the hundred thousands to the millions, so people who want to play for a set amount of money have other options already.
And there’s no way to have your “if it’s $850 million there are 85 winners” result with the current game, you’d have to completely redo the rules. I’m not really sure how you rewrite the game to have an increasing jackpot and an exact number of winners each time while also being easily understood, and you definitely can’t just have a simple drawing of numbers for it the way you can with Powerball. If it’s some complicated algorithm that just runs on a computer to spit out the right number of winners, that will probably turn off a lot of people too.
No, getting ‘on average’ to match up explicitly goes against the OP’s proposal. You need exactly 1 winner for every $10 million in the jackpot, so you need a system that gives you no winners some weeks (otherwise you always have 4x winners and the pot never builds) but the correct number of winners if anyone wins. That’s actually pretty tricky to set up in a way that people will want to play.
$3 million is a decent sized retirement fund.
$3 million is not retire in your 40’s. $3 million is not a mansion & a yacht, & private jets; that’s $500 million.
That’s incredibly evil, and I love it! Imagine some poor sucker happy that he won $21 million, only to discover you keep twenty of it, and he gets one! I think there was an episode of Martin that explored a similar theme…