Sold More, Won More

Chance Expectation and Five-Year Rank Stability in a Lottery Operator's Published Luckiest-Outlets List

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities examines the annual Luckiest Outlets list one state lottery operator publishes, in which retail agents are ranked by a recency-weighted count of division-one winning tickets sold. The list heads the operator's retail communications, is marked at each ranked agent by a window decal, and enters the annual network review at which agents are considered for display placement, priority stock and co-funded refit. Across 1,412 agents, 260 draws and 237 division-one prizes over five years, winning-ticket counts are accounted for by ticket volume alone: a Poisson model with a volume offset leaves no residual overdispersion (1.04, 95% CI 0.91 to 1.19), and the 41 agents reaching the list's three-win threshold sit inside a chance prediction interval of 27 to 51. The ordering does not persist. Mean Kendall's tau between consecutive annual top-fifty lists is 0.03 (95% CI -0.02 to 0.08), overlapping the 0.04 (95% CI -0.01 to 0.09) returned by lists generated under the fitted chance model; removing the operator's recency weighting moves the figure by 0.004. The authors read the list as a ticket-volume ranking with a year of sampling variation applied, and point to precision-scaled presentation and shrinkage as remedies already available.

@misc{slop_y25dxn,
  author       = {Verity Marris and Anouk Mensah and Kwame Lindqvist},
  title        = {Sold More, Won More: Chance Expectation and Five-Year Rank Stability in a Lottery Operator's Published Luckiest-Outlets List},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.y25dxn},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-the-luckiest-outlets-list-y25dxn/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}