Would you take this action?

Quote: Wizard

I looked at the spreadsheet but couldn't follow how you got the 403,722,000 tickets will be sold. Can't we just do the jackpot growth divided by contribution per ticket? The odds of winning are 1 in 1 in 175,711,536. That would result in an expected 2.29764 winners. Using the Poisson distribution, the probability of 2 or more winners is 66.9%.

I addressed split jackpots in a recent Ask the Wizard, but it doesn't indicate how much jackpot size induces sales.

Wiz thanks for taking the time to look at this problem. Sorry I didn't get back before the drawing but was busy with other commitments. I came up with the 403M tickets by plotting the last 5 estimated number of tickets vs the jackpot amount. Then adding a polynomial trendline in the second order to the points. I used the polynomial trendline because it has the best R sqaure value, and made sense by showing a big increase as the lottery drawing amount went up.

Quote: Wizard

I have looked into this some more.

First lottoreport.com shows the jackpot grew from $242M to $355M, or by $113M.

According to Durango Bill you can roughly get the number of tickets sold by multiplying the jackpot growth by 3. So that would be 339M tickets sold.

The probability of winning is 1 in 175,711,536. So there should be 1.93 winners.

The probability of 0 is 14.53%.
The probability of 1 is 28.03%.
The probability of 2 or more is 57.44%.

Two people did win the jackpot. I took at look at the distribution from the megamillions website and in fact there was a large number of 2 + 1 winners as a member predicted earlier in the other lottery thread. I'm not sure if this is due to the numbers being from Lost or just an anomaly, but nevertheless I thought it was interesting. Using the weighed average formula, I came up with an estimated number of tickets being sold as approx 221,200,000. The 2 + 1 category would indicate approximately 352,600,000 tickets were sold. I way over estimated the number of tickets sold, but am glad I did because it saved me 20 bucks as I didn't make the bet. Thanks to all members who aided in this discussion.

There were $229,421,186 in tickets sold according to http://lottoreport.com/mmsales.htm just scroll to where the charts are.

Quote: DeMango

Does anyone else here think that the lottery is the best invention for taxing the poor? Positive expected value? Please! Double digit million to one odds against, on winning with a single ticket? I would rather find a way to put a dent in Steve Wynn's bottom line!

Its also the best invention for taxing the stupid.

So did you take the bet or pass?

Quote: Alan

So did you take the bet or pass?

I'm curious about that also, but I tend to think that he took (and therefore lost) the bet because he was so specific as to the terms and that means he and his friend had probably finalized the details of the bet.

I think it was a poor bet because the purchase of additional tickets is often stimulated by media stories and the relatively slow news days in December coupled with a year end need for "feel good" features about one year ending and another one starting meant that staggering lottery amounts would get good publicity.

Quote: pcket5s

I way over estimated the number of tickets sold, but am glad I did because it saved me 20 bucks as I didn't make the bet. Thanks to all members who aided in this discussion.

He didn't take the action.

Thanks, I missed that one. Good for him.