Why lotteries can make winning feel more valuable than buying
Recommended Video Put that same ticket behind the three simple words, “Enter to win,” and suddenly it feels worth chasing, as if winning feels more valuable than buying. It may seem like the lottery is what creates the excitement, but economist Judd Kessler says it’s often a sign the excitement was already there. “The reason they’re having a lottery in the first place is because there is what economists would call excess demand,” he told Fortune.
- ▪Recommended Video Put that same ticket behind the three simple words, “Enter to win,” and suddenly it feels worth chasing, as if winning feels more valuable than buying.
- ▪It may seem like the lottery is what creates the excitement, but economist Judd Kessler says it’s often a sign the excitement was already there.
- ▪“The reason they’re having a lottery in the first place is because there is what economists would call excess demand,” he told Fortune.
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Record
| Original publisher | Fortune |
| Canonical URL | https://fortune.com/2026/07/26/lotteries-winning-vs-buying-value-scarcity-demand-hidden-markets/ |
| Publication time | Sun, 26 Jul 2026 09:30:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-26T09:43:57.564Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-26T09:43:57.564Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | wFKhqFnORzhd |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Buying a ticket is one thing. Recommended Video Put that same ticket behind the three simple words, “Enter to win,” and suddenly it feels worth chasing, as if winning feels more valuable than buying. It may seem like the lottery is what creates the excitement, but economist Judd Kessler says it’s often a sign the excitement was already there. “The reason they’re having a lottery in the first place is because there is what economists would call excess demand,” he told Fortune. “More people want the thing at that price than can be served.” In other words, lotteries often reveal demand rather than create it.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Fortune.
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