Is there a reason that most of the time there is only 1 jackpot winner? When the winning money goes into the tens of millions I always think, why not just share the money out over lots of people and give say 10,000 here and 500,000 there. Wouldn’t this be better for the economy rather than having just 1 person have it all?
In: Economics
I’m a little confused. I’m not sure how lotteries work elsewhere, but the “education” lotteries where I live (where the profits help fund public education), they do already do this.
If you get a few numbers matching, you get a $ prize. The more numbers that match on a ticket, the more you win. So, for example, if you match all 6 numbers in MegaMillions, you get the jackpot (and it IS split amongst ALL tickets that match all 6). If you match 5 of the six (all five of the regular numbers but not the “mega ball”) then you win $1 million. So smaller amounts are already paid out to many, many people based on how many numbers they matched.
Maybe you’re asking why they don’t divide out the whole $20 million jackpot (what the base megamillions jackpot resets to after someone hits the jackpot) amongst all tickets that match any numbers, at every single drawing?
If so, that’s because it would bankrupt the system. They’d have to pay out $20 million twice a week, instead of being able to collect tickets sale revenue as the jackpot goes up s-l-o-w-l-y until the occasional times some ticket does finally match all and hit the jackpot.
Think of it this way: Right now the MegaMillions jackpot is $117 million.
The last time a jackpot was won was June 8, 2021.
There have been 10 drawings since then (every Tuesday and Friday). If they split the full $20 million amongst all tickets each time, they would have already paid out $200 million. By only paying out fixed amounts for any matches except a complete jackpot and slowly increasing the jackpot, even if somebody hits the jackpot today (Friday) they have collected $83 million more in revenue for education funding by using the current system. So I guess the simplest answer is that they don’t split out the whole jackpot each time because the purpose of the lottery is to generate revenue, not to thrill people with a cool windfall.
Back when I was a kid, there were big “sweepstakes” that I *think* did give out all the prize money, but they were used as advertising for products the sweepstakes sponsor was hawking (look up Publisher’s Clearinghouse Sweepstakes, that’s the one we always got mail flyer entries for). So the whole purpose there was to show off them giving people an amazing “lucky” windfall, to draw attention to the sponsor’s name in a big way.
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