But the simplest explanation doesn’t require much theoretical heavy lifting at all. Simply: buying a lottery ticket, whether you win or not, is, in some small way, fun. Not Caribbean vacation fun, not all-night dance party fun, but one or two dollars’ worth of fun? Quite possibly so. There are reasons to doubt this explanation (for instance, lottery players themselves tend to cite the prospect of winning as their primary reason for playing), but it does an admirable job of explaining the behavior we see.
