Lucky lotto stores
From the Northern Advocate
An unprecedented run of success in selling winning Lotto second division winning tickets has a Whangarei store on tenterhooks expecting an even bigger win soon.
Now, in one sense this is rubbish: lotto is drawn randomly. Previous wins can’t function as an outward and visible sign of a inward propensity to sell lucky tickets, because there is no such thing.
On the other hand, statistically, you would expect a store that has sold a lot of winning tickets in the past to sell a lot of winning tickets in the future. That’s because a store that has sold a lot of winning tickets has probably just sold a lot of tickets.
A ‘lucky’ lotto vendor will usually be one that’s made a lot of profits for Lotto New Zealand. As to whether its customers are lucky, well, you don’t tend to see stories like this set in Herne Bay or Thorndon.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »