Andy Kiersz February 11, 2015 The Powerball lottery drawing for Wednesday evening has an estimated jackpot prize of $500 million. While that's a huge amount of money, buying a ticket is still probably a losing proposition. Consider the expected value When trying to evaluate the outcome of a risky, probabilistic event like the lottery, one of the first things to look at is "expected value". The expected value of a randomly decided process is found by taking all of the possible outcomes of the process, multiplying each outcome by its probability, and adding all of these numbers up. This gives...