Abrams, Aaron; Garibaldi, Skip Finding good bets in the lottery, and why you shouldn’t take them. (English) Zbl 1200.00014 Am. Math. Mon. 117, No. 1, 3-26 (2010). Summary: Everyone knows that buying lottery tickets is a bad investment. But do you know why? You will most likely lose your dollar, but there is a small chance that you will win big. In some lottery drawings, your expected rate of return is spectacularly high. Do you know how to identify a drawing that has a positive expected rate of return? When you find one, how do you decide if it is a good investment? In a sense, such a drawing is a caricature of a typical investment, for which both the risks and the rewards are more modest. In general, how should an investor compare such alternatives? And can the lottery ever be a good investment? Cited in 3 Documents MSC: 00A09 Popularization of mathematics 97K50 Probability theory (educational aspects) 91A60 Probabilistic games; gambling Keywords:lottery; bets; investment; risk; jackpot PDFBibTeX XMLCite \textit{A. Abrams} and \textit{S. Garibaldi}, Am. Math. Mon. 117, No. 1, 3--26 (2010; Zbl 1200.00014) Full Text: DOI