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David_Gerard comments on On Lottery Tickets - Less Wrong
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Comments (26)
It certainly is concievable and in the world of your thought experiment buying a lottery ticket would in fact be rational. However such things don't exist in reality. People who buy lottery tickets don't do so because of entertainment value but because of a hope they would win. That's connotaionally implied by the term "lottery ticket". And therefore it's correct to use it as an example of common rationality failure.
A more realistic somewhat rational reason to buy lottery tickets would be when the gains of the lottery company are used to fund charitable projects and someone would reason that buying a lottery ticket increases the jackpot and thereby makes the lottery ticket more attractive to a lot of irrational people and thus increase the gains for the charity.
The fraction is really not very large. Camelot (the lottery operator in the UK) has in fact been specifically enjoined from stating or implying that buying a lottery ticket meaningfully contributes to charity.
LotteryWest runs the West Australian lottery and the fraction they donate to charity is enourmous, so that's a generalisation that does not necessarily hold true everywhere.