A lottery is a game of chance in which players pay an entry fee and try to win a prize by matching numbers selected at random. It is a form of gambling, but it is legal in some countries and provides the potential for very large winnings. A lottery is normally run by a state or private corporation. Prizes may be cash or goods. In addition to attracting participants, lotteries must be financially sound and have sufficient administrative infrastructure for collecting and paying winning tickets.

During the early stages of a lottery, prizes must be attractive enough to stimulate ticket sales, and the organizers must determine how much the total prize pool will be and how often it will be awarded. There must also be a plan for covering costs and distributing the profits, which are usually a percentage of ticket sales. Finally, the lottery must balance the benefits of a few large prizes against the costs of organizing and promoting the games, the sunk costs of unused tickets, and the need to attract new participants.

The earliest recorded lotteries were held in the Low Countries in the 15th century, and there are records from that period showing that people won money by playing for a variety of purposes, including helping the poor. The game continued to grow in popularity, and today most states run their own lotteries. In those that don’t, the reasons vary: Alabama and Utah are motivated by religious concerns; Mississippi and Nevada, where gambling is legal, have a built-in customer base; and Alaska has no need for additional revenue sources.

While the lottery has grown in size and complexity, few states have a clear public policy for it. In fact, most of the policies are piecemeal and incremental, and only rarely take into account the overall effects of the games on society. Public officials who have authority over the lottery are scattered throughout government and often lack a coherent overview of the industry.

Lottery critics focus on specific features of the games, such as the problem of compulsive gamblers and alleged regressive impacts on lower-income groups. While those concerns are valid, they are not as important to the long-term success of a lottery as its ability to attract and retain customers.

The key to that success is the degree to which a lottery’s proceeds are perceived as benefiting a particular public good, such as education. The most successful lotteries are those that stress the specific benefit of the funds they raise and make the case that anyone who plays is doing a civic duty to support their state. But that message is lost if jackpots are routinely set at apparently newsworthy amounts. The bottom quintile of the income distribution has little discretionary spending power to spend a significant portion of their incomes on lottery tickets, and so is less likely to play.