I’m glad to
have had the opportunity to participate in this lottery project and learn
"hands on" the methods of Statistics in Professor Busald’s class. To
most people, the term statistics simply represents numerical data.
However, my appreciation and understanding of the discipline of statistics has
been elevated to a higher level through the various processes that we, the
students, undertook this semester to gather, analyze, and interpret (rank) the
data we collected on each individual state lottery system.
I’ve learned
that there is a wide disparity of best and worst practices between different
state lottery systems and a great difference in how each state lottery system
is conducted.
- There are some states that will continue to sell
scratch off tickets even after the top prize is claimed and others that
incorporate a better practice, we feel, of immediately requiring the
retailers to pull the entire game and stop selling tickets after the last
top prize is claimed.
- There are states that use "education"
to justify their purpose for their lottery when in actuality no new monies
are allocated to the education system from the lottery in excess of their
educational budget, whereas, other states actually donate a large portion
of earnings from the lottery to scholarship programs on top of their
original education budget.
- Some states donate a fair percentage to problem
gambling programs; other states donate no monies to problem gambling.
- Some states report the odds more accurately and
complete for each prize level, others do not give a true representation of
the odds by including "free tickets" in their odds statement.
- Some states inform their players in their
advertising of the "annuitized jackpot," whereas, other states
just advertise "jackpot" and this could mislead their players into
believing that the advertised jackpot is the cash value.
It would be my
hope that the results of this statistical project will, ultimately, have a
positive impact and influence on all the states to continue to improve their
lottery systems for their citizens by adopting some of the best practices we
discovered.
Lorraine Gonzales
Math 1442.001
Fall 2007