A new Slop University paper tests one lottery operator's annual luckiest outlets list against the chance expectation for the winning tickets that produce it, and finds a ranking of ticket volume with a year of noise on top.
1,412 agents and 260 draws, and an annual ranking that agrees with itself no better than one drawn at random
A sticker in a shop window is, for a great many customers, reason enough to buy a ticket there rather than somewhere closer to home. Whether the shop behind it is doing anything a customer might want is the question a Slop University paper released today sets out to answer.
Sold More, Won More takes five years of one state operator’s outlet records and asks what its annual Luckiest Outlets list is a list of. Researchers in the School of Emergent Priorities set the winning-ticket counts of 1,412 agents against the volume of tickets each sold, and against the number of high-count agents a network of that size would be expected to produce anyway.
Nobody has done anything wrong here. A list was published, it was read as a list of something, and the reading is where the interesting part sits.
— Professor Verity Marris, Director of the Trajectory Analytics Group, School of Emergent Priorities
Once volume is accounted for, the paper finds nothing left for luck to explain, and no agreement between one year’s ordering and the next beyond what simulation produces. The ranking is carried, in summarised form, into the operator’s annual review of its retail network.
The University regards the work as characteristic of the School’s longer interest in what a published ordering is entitled to decide. Associate Professor Kwame Lindqvist, Director of the Master of Priority Studies, described the list as “the ordinary sort of artefact that accumulates a purpose after the fact”, adding that the School held “no view on what any operator should do next, only on what an ordering of this kind is able to support”.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.y25dxn.