Lottery:
A competition based on chance, in which numbered tickets are sold and prizes are awarded to winners whose numbers match those drawn at random. Lotteries are usually regulated by governments to ensure fairness and legality. There are many different types of lottery games, including financial ones in which players pay a small sum to win a large amount of money. Most states have their own state-sponsored lotteries. A few have national games, such as the Mega Millions and Powerball.
While some people purchase lottery tickets as a low-risk investment, others do so to indulge in fantasies of instant wealth. Whatever the motivation, a lot of people spend billions on these purchases each year—which translates into forgone savings they could have made elsewhere. Moreover, because of the percentage that goes to prize payouts, purchasing a lottery ticket amounts to a form of indirect taxation on consumers.
To understand why so many people buy lottery tickets, one must consider the underlying incentives. The purchase of a lottery ticket cannot be explained by decision models based on expected value maximization, which show that the cost of a ticket exceeds the expected gains. However, other models based on utility functions defined on things other than the outcome of the lottery can account for this behavior. Another way to understand the lottery is to study scratch off tickets. Look for the outside numbers that repeat, and mark each spot where you find a singleton. A group of these marks indicates a winning ticket 60-90% of the time.