I’m not sure where to post this but seeing as I doubt there is a factual answer I will post it here. I have seen statistical evidence and anecdotal evidence of people buying more and more lottery tickets as the prize gets larger. This has always struck me as being odd behaviour, almost as if people aren’t willing to spend £1 on a ticket to win £10 million but are willing to spend money for the chance of winning £20 million. I have always thought that when you get to such high sums of money doubling it will have little extra benefit to your life style. What is it that people would do with £20 million that they couldn’t do with £10 million?
So, if you are one of these people that either doesn’t buy ‘regular’ tickets but does buy on the rollover or buys more tickets in a rollover week, why? Do you not consider £10 million to be worth the trouble of purchasing a ticket?
Being a relatively risk averse student of utility theory, I don’t buy lottery tickets (though scratch-offs are quite fun).
But I would venture a guess (since we are in the opinion forum and I don’t need hard facts to back me up) that it’s the excitement of a larger number. If you’re the first-day winner of $2mil, you’re going to have a nice boost to your bank account, but it’s not dramatic. If you’re the winner of a built up $50mil, you’ll be in the local paper, friends will know of your outstanding luck, you’re a darned swell guy, and you’ve just satisfied one of the middle-class dreams-come-true scenarios: the big lotto payoff. In addition to the greater payout (assuming you don’t split the larger pot with others), it’s just cooler.
Only Mostly Missus will buy just one ticket when the lottery builds up large, but never any other time. She says it is fun to dream. She also insists that one ticket is all you need to win and she’s holding that ticket. For a dollar, we get a little laugh out of each other over the absurdity of the lottery. Until, of course, that next ticket wins and we’re filthy stinkin’ rich, suckers! BWAHAHA!
For me, it’s I can’t see spending a few bucks every week on something I’m not likely to win. The lotto is always at 1 or 2 or even 10 million, so I’d be buying all the time, and I’d be throwing away money. Throwing away 5 or 10 dollars a couple of times a year on a big prize that I’m not likely to win doesn’t bother me as much.
Might be faulty reasoning, but it’s the way I see it.
To take the UK lottery as an example, your odds of winning are 1 in 14 million. Jackpots are typically £5-8 million, and tickets cost £1. So in an ordinary week you are effectively placing a £1 bet at 14 million to one against, which pays out £8 million if it wins. Not good odds - you’re expected outcome in the long term (i.e. after 14 million or so trials) is substantially negative. When it’s a rollover, OTOH, and the jackpot is £15 million, your expected outcome is positive, so it makes much more sense mathematically to buy the ticket. Of course, all this is screwed up by the fact that a) 1 or more others may share the jackpot with you and b) you won’t live to see 14 million lotteries. But it works for me - though I often buy a ticket in a non-rollover week, despite knowing the odds :).
The rollovers get more publicity than a normal week. When the Euromillions jackpot went to £100 million and then to £125 million it was difficult to avoid the buzz. The newspapers get in on the act and provide free publicity as B-list celebs appear in photoshoots draped over the words “£100 MILLION” and raising a glass of champage.
Those two weeks, my office (very few of whom play weekly) had a 40-strong syndicate going. I don’t think most punters are working out the odds, they’re just becoming more aware as the publicity machine rolls into action.
If you’re only going to buy tickets a few times a year, it is only logical to make it when the payoff is the highest. If there were two lotteries running on the same day, with the same exact odds and intermediate payoff structure, but one had a jackpot twice the size, which would YOU choose?
Also consider this… If $10M makes you set for life, then $100M makes you, your parents, your siblings, your inlaws etc etc set for life. Much more bang for your lottery buck, and you have the exact same chance of winning the $100M lottery as you do when it’s $10M.
Occasionally the pot will get so large as to make the expected payoff positive. But even in this case, I don’t play, as the odds of winning are so small. Then again, I don’t know any lottery pools: if I did, I might play in those circumstances, as a 1 in 500,000 chance to win $1 million is worth it to me.
Human nature: the more money available, the more people who don’t usually play will think “Why not?” Also, big lottery jackpots tend to be publicized on the news before the drawing, so those who don’t regularly play figure it’d be worth their while to spend the buck.
With me its just pot luck. If I happen to be buying something in a newsagency when the jackpot is say $15million, I figure, “Why not, I can make all my family and a few friends well off (and buy a proper server for the SDMB) for a few bucks.”
This is why I do it. If I were to win $10 million, I could quit my job, sure, but that’s about it. If I win the $350 million jackpots Powerball gets every couple years, I not only never have to work again in my life, I can buy a house on Fifth Avenue and another one outside Florence and my own jet to shuttle me between them.
The lottery jackpot here is not so large under normal circumstances, equivalent to only about $300 000 which would not really change my life especially if two or more people win the jackpot and it would have to be shared. Whereas on Saturday it will be the equivalent of around $1,3 million which would change my life so when the sum is huge like that I tend to buy about twenty tickets. Still have not won the jackpot though.
That’s the only time I ever buy one, when it gets up over $100 million. I know it’s a waste of money, but I’ll roll a $5 crap shoot on $100+ million a couple of times a year. I guess when it gets past $100 million, I figure the pot odds are good enough* for a $5 bet, even though the odds of winning are still as shitty as ever.
*Yes, a $5 bet on $100 million is 20 million:1 where the lottery odds are 47 million:1, I was just joking…
I do the opposite. I irregularly buy tickets in the Cash for Life lottery (1000 dollars a week for life!) on the grounds that the chance of winning is higher. I hope I can take the prize as a lump sum (which I have heard is around 600 000 dollars).
But I’ve never won more than 12 dollars, and even that was only once. I wouldn’t mind the fifty-thousand-dollar second prize. That’s still a year’s salary to me.
My uncle won the lottery for 4 million dollars in the early 1980’s. He was a loser that bought hundreds of dollars in tickets every month. Not surprisingly, he didn’t magically get any money skills after he cashed the ticket in either. At first, he claimed that he was going to have a house in Italy, San Francisco, and Florida. They only had 20 year installments then so he was only pulling in 150K a year or so. Pretty good but he wasn’t even one of the richest ones in the family.
He finally figured out that he could only have a house in Florida. He put his amazing skills to work and managed to do nothing, save nothing, and accumulate nothing of value over those 20 years. His payments ran out 2 years ago. His wife left him taking most of his only asset (his house) and he is on welfare now.
I think the lottery is generally evil to those who when because those who play a lot are least equipped to handle it.
I only play when jackpots are huge because I have a certain idea of what lotteries are supposed to do. If I am a lottery winner, I expect to be fabulously wealthy. You have to automatically reduce advertised jackpots by about 75% to account for the lump sum penalty and taxes.
That rules out me playing any jackpot under $10 million because it would just piss me off if I won. I plan to have that much money on my own anyway. $20 million would be ok and I would settle for $30 million as well. The real image I have though is the $100 million jackpots. That would leave about $25 million in cash that I could invest and live off of and the principle itself would grow providing for a legacy. I could deal with that.
I have somewhat strict “guidelines” on how/when I play the lottery. Primarily I don’t start to play until it reaches a certain amount - around $26 million. As I read the OP and starting to think about my strategy it kind of boils down to two sides:
The semi-logical, practical side: To me the point of winning the lottery is to be able to win enough to not have to work. At $26 million, paid out over 26 years, with the government taking half, that comes to an annual payout of around $500k - a very comfortable income to retire on. Obviously larger pots would pay out more.
Also, the larger the pot, the more people play. And thereby, the chances of having to split the pot get greater. So again, I’d want a pot that’s big enough that if I had to split it, I could still retire (I could also retire on $250k / year).
The imagination side: truth be told, when I play the lottery it is like paying $10 to “fantasize” for a couple days. That is, it’s like paying that much for entertainment - like paying for a ticket to see a movie (about the same amount). And to fantasize about less than a larger amount, just isn’t worth it. To think about what you would do with, say $7 million (paid out over 26 years, half going to the government) isn’t all that thrilling. So you need the big amounts to really come up with some nice dreams (huge house, as opposed to just a “new” house, etc.)
Forgot to mention: I actually won $22,000 last year from the California lotto. Not a huge amount, and certainly a far cry from retiring on. But based on how much I’ve played, I’m now “up” !
The bigger the prize the more tickets that are sold and consequently the greater the odds against winning!
Per Puck, “What fools these mortals be.”
The lottery management ecourages buying tickets by putting heavy emhasis on the winners and particularly serial winners who win more than once.
Never a peep about the myriads of ticket buyers who buy tickets regularly in the vain hope of hitting the BIG One.
Currently the Tennessee Lottery has a Power Ball Jackpot $250 Million.
Ticket buyers come from adjacent states, in addition to residents, to buy all the tickets they can’t afford.
I’ll be the first to admit that odds and probability are not my strong suit, but I don’t see how the number of people who buy tickets affects the odds of winning a lotto jackpot. I can see how it could reduce the odds of winning the jackpot alone, but since winning is solely dictated by picking the correct numbers, why would it matter if one hundred or one billion other people bought a ticket?
