Quote:

Quote:
What lottery game were they playing and in what markets?

Our own local Croatian lottery has rules that make expected return on certain weeks larger than 1 (I believe others are similar). They pay back 50%, but if nobody has, say, 7 numbers in 7/49 game in a particular week, money allocated for that goes in next week's jackpot. As the result, there are weeks when jackpot alone is more than twice as large as the money people payed for tickets. So, if one plays only in those weeks, expected return is more than 1. The more money one puts, shorter the time interval in which actual returns are likely to average to more that 1. And, of course, it is impossible to know how many people will, led by the same reasoning, buy more tickets on high jackpot weeks, possible diluting the odds below 1.

Hm, I was not terribly clear, was I?