EXAMPLE 4.28 The Tri-State Pick 3 Lottery

Most states and Canadian provinces have government-sponsored lotteries. Here is a simple lottery wager from the Tri-State Pick 3 game that New Hampshire shares with Maine and Vermont. You choose a three-digit number, 000 to 999. The state chooses a three-digit winning number at random and pays you $500 if your number is chosen.

Because there are 1000 three-digit numbers, you have probability 1/1000 of winning. Taking to be the amount your ticket pays you, the probability distribution of is

The random process consists of drawing a three-digit number. The population consists of the numbers 000 to 999. Each of these possible outcomes is equally likely in this example. In the setting of sampling in Chapter 3 (page 132), we can view the random process as selecting an SRS of size 1 from the population. The random variable is 500 if the selected number is equal to the one that you chose and is 0 if it is not.

What is your average payoff from many tickets? The ordinary average of the two possible outcomes $0 and $500 is $250, but that makes no sense as the average because $500 is much less likely than $0. In the long run, you receive $500 once in every 1000 tickets and $0 on the remaining 999 of 1000 tickets. The long-run average payoff is

or 50 cents. That number is the mean of the random variable . (Tickets cost $1, so in the long run, the state keeps half the money you wager.)