Lotteries - Lottery History, Lottery Games, International Lottery Games, Lottery Administration, Lottery Player Demographics, Group Play

A lottery is a game of chance in which people pay for the opportunity to win prizes. All money taken in by a lottery is pooled and used to award the winners and to pay the costs of administering the lottery. The money left over is profit. Lotteries are extremely popular around the world and are legal in more than a hundred countries.

In the United States all lotteries are operated by state governments that have granted themselves the sole right to do so. In other words, they are monopolies that do not allow any commercial lotteries to compete against them. The profits from U.S. lotteries are used solely to fund government programs. As of August 2004, lotteries operated in forty states and the District of Columbia. (See Figure 7.1.) This means that at that time, 90% of the U.S. population lived in a state with an operating lottery. In addition, lottery tickets can be legally purchased by any adult physically present in a lottery state, even if that adult does not reside in the state.

As shown in Figure 7.2, Americans wagered more than $44 billion in lotteries during fiscal year 2003 (July 2002–June 2003). U.S. lottery sales were up 6.6% from fiscal year 2002 and increased steadily between 1998 and 2003.