eli5 Rather than having 1 winner with the lottery with sometimes over 1 hundred million pounds, why not share that money out amongst many, many people?

Question

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

Answer 1

Would you spend $10 on a ticket that is guaranteed to give $4 prize and nothing else?

Lottery, if you reduce variation in results, boils down to that. I don’t think there are many people stupid enough to put money in to a game where each time you’re guaranteed to lose.

But if there’s a tiny chance of getting huge amount of money? Well that’s different.