I think it&#x27;s a stretch of the imagination to suggest that lottery players would be better off at all if they removed the &quot;excise tax&quot; by opening it up to competition. One of the characteristics of monopolies is they tend to profit by selling fewer units than a competitive market does, and fewer lottery tickets sold is a <i>good</i> thing for gamblers.<p>The comparison to casino games in the article is particularly unhelpful, since the reason why most casino games have low house edges is nothing to do with competition and everything to do with being designed to encourage bigger and more frequent bets by deluding the gambler into believing their small wins are cancelling out their small losses. A roulette player loses 5.3% per spin, not per week, and since bets are sequential and games fairly rapid, a weekly session at a casino don&#x27;t even have to be unusually long for expected losses to approach 35-55% of the amount bet; the same proportion of principal the participant could otherwise have expected to lose on buying tickets for that week&#x27;s lottery. But because of the structure of the returns, people tend to bet more in casinos, and they can spend all day every day there if they want to. Bookmakers for horse racing are actually in a more competitive market than casinos in most areas but have much bigger house edges, because races can only happen so fast.<p>Lotteries are at the other end of the scale, marketing the dream of a weekly opportunity to achieve massive lifestyle changes to people whose decision to play isn&#x27;t at all affected by whether they can remember ever winning anything from it, and probably have no idea of the expected return from the game they play<p>And allowing people three different privately-run massive dream jackpots to pursue is probably going to encourage them to buy <i>more</i> tickets. This means that even if margins do come down as a result of competition - despite participants&#x27; indifference to expected return and marketers&#x27; active avoidance of the subject - a lottery player tempted to buy a ticket in each of three competing weekly lotteries is almost certainly worse off than they would have been had there just been a single lottery in town (and they been happy to settle for a single ticket per week). It seems certain that new entrants pushing similar products will increase rather than decrease the amount wasted on lotteries; demand for lottery tickets simply isn&#x27;t elastic enough with respect to expected return[1] for the alternate scenario of them succeeding by cannibalising the state lottery&#x27;s business with juicy jackpots to make sense.<p>[1]if it was elastic with respect to expected return, demand would be negative!