A Winners Mean Earnings in Lottery and Inverse Moments of the Binomial Distribution.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Journal of Probability and Statistics Volume 2010, Article ID 279154, 16 pages doi:10.1155/2010/279154 Research Article A Winner’s Mean Earnings in Lottery and Inverse Moments of the Binomial Distribution Konstantinos Drakakis1, 2 1 UCD CASL, University College Dublin, Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland 2 School of Electronic, Electrical Mechanical Engineering, University College Dublin, Dublin 4, Ireland Correspondence should be addressed to Konstantinos Drakakis, drakakis@ Received 5 November 2009; Revised 30 January 2010; Accepted 16 February 2010 Academic Editor: Daniel Zelterman Copyright q 2010 Konstantinos Drakakis. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. We study the mean earnings of a lottery winner as a function of the number n of participants in the lottery and of the success probability p. We show, in particular, that, for fixed p, there exists an optimal value of n where the mean earnings are maximized. We also establish a relation with the inverse moments of a binomial distribution and suggest new formulas exact and approximate for them. 1. Introduction The game of lottery is both popular and simple. Focusing on the essentials, and leaving aside additional features of secondary importance, which vary across different lottery implementations, the rules of the game are as follows: each player submits to the lottery organizers a ticket consisting of M integers selected by the player, without repetitions, selection order being unimportant from the range 1, . . . , N; within the prespecified time period the game is s