Lottery odds: Are some tickets more valuable than others

probability

Let's say the odds of winning a scratch-off lottery game are exactly 1 in 1000, and I purchase 100 tickets at a local convenience store. The company that makes the lottery tickets always creates them in batches of one million tickets with exactly 1000 winning tickets in each batch. After scratching-off 99 losers in a row from the 100 I bought, is there any reason to think that the 1 remaining ticket is somewhat more likely to be a winner than a new one that somebody else might purchase at the store?
What has me perplexed is that when I purchased the 100 tickets, there would have been a finite number of tickets in circulation – by scratching off 99 losers from that finite pool it would seem that I have effectively reduced the pool size but not the expectation of their being winners within that pool. In other words, the odds of remaining tickets in that pool being winners seem to have magically improved. Back at the convenience store (where possibly they received a new shipment of tickets) the odds would remain 1 in 1000 though, right?

Best Answer

This is conditional expected probability. Given that you scratched a bunch of tickets, you know that the probability of the last one being a winner is increased only because you know that the tickets are not independently random; there is a set $1000$ out of a million winners.

However, if each ticket was independently random (i.e each ticket had a $0.1\%$ win rate) then you'd still have the same chance.

Back to your other paradox: given that you didn't win, you now know that all remaining tickets have an increased chance of being a winner, including those at the store. But that's only knowing that you didn't win - a random stranger couldn't use this logic without knowing that you didn't already win.

One last note, in real life this doesn't actually matter much as the number of tickets produced is so huge that even buying a thousand tickets would barely make a dent in the 'odds' of each one, and besides I'm not sure if lottery companies ensure there are at least X winners although I could be wrong.

Edit: answering your title question, no, the tickets are all equally valuable before you scratch yours. After you scratch yours, the ones at the store are actually slightly more likely of being winners, but there was no way to work that out without buying your tickets first.

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