2015/03/31 by Richard Arratia, Skip Garibaldi, Lawrence Mower +1 · 1 citation
Business, Management and Accounting · Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Mathematics · #Consumer Market Behavior and Pricing #Enforcement #Epistemology #Financial Risk and Volatility Modeling #Function (biology) #Law #Lottery #Luck #Mathematical economics #Mathematics #Philosophy #Political science #Sports Analytics and Performance #Statistics #math.PR #msc:91A60 #msc:97K80
paper · pdf · doi:10.4169/math.mag.88.3.196
published as Math. Mag. 88 (2015), 196-211 · v2 adds more details about the application of the BKR inequality
arxiv created 2015/04/28 · openalex publication_date 2015/06/01 · arxiv updated 2015/08/06 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
SummaryWe looked at the Florida Lottery records of winners of prizes worth 600 or more. Some individuals claimed large numbers of prizes. Were they lucky, or up to something? We distinguished the “plausibly lucky” from the “implausibly lucky” by solving optimization problems that took into account the particular games each gambler won. Plausibility was determined by finding the minimum expenditure so that if every Florida resident spent that much, the chance that any of them would win as often as the gambler did would still be less than one in a million. Dealing with dependent bets relied on the BKR inequality; solving the optimization problem numerically relied on the log-concavity of the regularized Beta function. Subsequent investigation by law enforcement confirmed that the gamblers we identified as “implausibly lucky” were indeed behaving illegally.