English

Finding good bets in the lottery, and why you shouldn't take them

History and Overview 2025-07-04 v1 Probability Statistical Finance

Abstract

We give a criterion under which the expected return on a ticket for certain large lotteries is positive. In this circumstance, we use elementary portfolio analysis to show that an optimal investment strategy includes a very small allocation for such tickets.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2507.01993,
  title  = {Finding good bets in the lottery, and why you shouldn't take them},
  author = {Aaron Abrams and Skip Garibaldi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.01993},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

This is the second of eleven old articles being uploaded to arxiv after publication