An Economist’s Guide to Lottery Design

This paper outlines the issues relevant to the design of pari‐mutuel lottery games and makes inferences about game design effects from estimates of how rollovers affect sales. Lottery tickets sales depend positively on the proportion of revenue returned as prizes, positively on the skewness of the prize distribution (which depends largely on how much of the prize money goes to the jackpot), and negatively on the variance in the prize distribution (which depends largely on how much goes on smaller prizes). We simulate the effects of envisaged game design changes on sales revenue and find potentially large effects.