History is littered with examples of the use of the lottery, as well as its benefits. The first recorded lottery dates from the Han Dynasty in China, between 205 and 187 BC. The money raised from the lottery helped finance major government projects. In the Chinese Book of Songs, the game of chance is mentioned as “drawing lots and wood.”

Today, most states have a state-run lottery, as do the US Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico. While the majority of states have state-run lotteries, only a handful have federal-level lottery games. While these are still the main way to play the lottery, some online lotteries are expanding their service offerings to include Instant Games, or casino-style games that allow players to wager without actually visiting a lottery office. These games are available both online and on mobile devices.

The first recorded lotteries offered money prizes and tickets. In the 17th century, the Netherlands held public lotteries to raise money for poor people and town fortifications. In addition to raising money for the poor, the lotteries were widely popular and were hailed as a form of taxation. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first lottery in Europe was held in 1569 in Flanders. Two years before that, advertisements for the lottery were published in England.

Purchasing a lottery ticket is a form of risk-seeking behavior. A lottery is a discrete distribution of probabilities over a set of states of nature. Its elements correspond to the probabilities of each state. As such, much of the theoretical analysis of choice under uncertainty involves a lottery. As such, the disutility of a monetary loss may be outweighed by the potential utility of the nonmonetary gains.