A lottery is an arrangement in which a prize, or series of prizes, is allocated by chance. The term is used most often to refer to a game of chance in which people buy numbered tickets and the winners are determined by drawing lots. However, the concept can also be applied to non-gambling activities such as military conscription, the distribution of property among a group of equally competing claimants, or even commercial promotions in which properties or jobs are given away at random.

Lottery games are a fixture of American culture, with Americans spending billions of dollars on them each year. Many people play because they enjoy the thrill of a potential big payout, but there’s something else going on that’s less obvious: the fact that lotteries are helping to perpetuate a myth of meritocracy in a nation with deep income inequality and limited social mobility.

It’s not just that people like to gamble; the odds of winning a lottery are extremely low, and the cost of playing is significant. But there’s a deeper reason for this behavior: The prevailing belief that states need money and that gambling is inevitable, so we might as well legalize it and promote it as a way to raise revenue.

The purchase of a lottery ticket cannot be accounted for by decision models based on expected value maximization, as the cost exceeds the expected payoff. But the theory of risk-seeking can account for this, as can more general utility functions defined on things other than the lottery outcome.