Considering the opportunity cost, we should play.
I was reading a simple but interesting blog post about playing lotteries and it expresses a fairly obvious but always being ignored idea that from an investment point of view, there is no winners of lotteries and thus posing the question that “How about changing the way you think about the lotteries you enter every day?”.
It is true that if we were asked to do something that we are 99% deemed to fail, we would normally rather do something else and leave it aside even if there is some fun hidden behind it. However, when we put this question into lottery world, the answers would be different due to our high expectations even if the possibility is extremely low. Looking at the simple white advertisement square board with the really high dollar amount that we could potentially win, we are hooked by the idea that why not try once since it’s not expensive to enter one piece of lottery and we would be millionaire if we really become the winner. Some people even got broke due to this thought. But usually the money put into the lottery goes nowhere.
However, if we buy one piece of lottery each time, the opportunity cost would be very small and if we lose, the money we put in last time would be a sunk cost and thus have no influence on the decision we make next time. Therefore, we can go on with this idea and keep purchasing one piece of lottery each time. Then we can come up with the interesting and exactly opposite conclusion that we should play the lottery due to the small opportunity cost.
Here is the link to the blog post I read.