Milton Friedman and Leonard Savage, who proposed that lottery players follow a squiggly utility curve, reflecting that people think about wealth in terms of classes, not numerical amounts. If you’re a middle-class worker who spends five bucks a week on the lottery, and you lose, that choice costs you a little money but doesn’t change your class position; despite the loss of money, the negative utility is pretty close to zero. But if you win, well, that moves you into a different stratum of society. You can think of this as the “deathbed” model—on your deathbed, will you care that you died with
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