Lottery Ticket Preferences as Indicated by the Variation in the Number of Winners |
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Authors: | Nigel E Turner |
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Institution: | (1) Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, 33 Russell Street, Toronto, ON, M5S 2S1, Canada;(2) Department of Public Health Sciences, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada |
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Abstract: | Many gamblers believe that it is possible to find a strategy to beat the lottery including selecting numbers that are due to come up or looking for a bias in past numbers. In this paper, we examine sales figures and variations in the number of winners for the various prize levels
of a popular Canadian lottery to detect lottery ticket preferences. It was determined that the lottery outcomes conformed
well to a random outcome. No evidence of either a bias myth or due to come up myth was found. However ticket popularity indicated a marked preference for the number 7 and low numbers, and the avoidance
of high numbers and adjacent numbers. In addition we found a linear and a quadratic relationship between past frequency of
the numbers and ticket popularity indicating a belief in both the due to come up and the bias myths. The findings suggest strong non-random preferences in the selection of lottery numbers. |
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