The Powerball lottery drawing for Wednesday evening has an estimated jackpot prize of $450 million.

While that’s a huge amount of money, buying a ticket is still probably a losing proposition.

Consider the expected value

When trying to evaluate the outcome of a risky, probabilistic event like the lottery, one of the first things to look at is “expected value.” The expected value of a randomly decided process is found by taking all of the possible outcomes of the process, multiplying each outcome by its probability, and adding all of these numbers up. This gives us a long-run average value for read more >>>

Source : BusinessInsider.Com