The number of jackpot
winning lottery tickets given the number of
tickets bought
Every
lottery ticket bought has a probability of 1 in 13,000,000 of
winning the jackpot. There is a standard method (the Binomial
distribution) for calculating the probability distribution of the
number of winning tickets (you can experiment yourself by running this
model in
AgenaRisk). If we do not know the number of tickets bought then
distribution for number of wining tickets looks like this (we
are assuming that the number of tickets boughts is Normally distributed
with a mean around 20,000,000 and a wide variance).
So
there is 0.26 probability of 0 winners and a slightly higher
probability of 1 winner. The probability of 5 winners is
about 0.03.
If we enter specific
numbers of tickets bought, as in the following examples, you
can see how the probability distribution for number of winners changes.
