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Comment by adv0r | Hacker News Reader

"We provide a lottery where you get just as much back as you put in (on average), as long as you're willing to wait a while. "

Target market : "Socialists, Communists, Poor people "

WTF

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This is actually already a thing. Rather than lottery pools, companies have a collection where people can contribute every week, and at regular intervals it 'pays out' to one person in the pool. Everyone wins in turn, it's effectively gamifying saving money, combined with the pooling aspect of corporate lottery buying. It's much more profitable than buying lotto tickets on average, because there's no outflow. In addition, the money can be stored in a short-term security, like a monthly rotation of one-year GICs. This requires more overhead to get started, but then you actually turn a small profit.

That said, I don't know if you could start a company around it. Most of the point is the social aspect of collecting the money and deciding who 'wins' for a given week ( I suppose you'd do a lottery from a pool where winners aren't re-entered)

This idea has been floated before: http://www.freakonomics.com/2010/11/18/freakonomics-radio-co...

Basically just taking all the interest from the loans, and splitting it up as payouts in a lottery among everybody who has money saved.

I knew I read it from Levitt somewhere. For better or worse, most of my knowledge of economics derives from his blog and books. Of course, he describes it better than I did.

I believe this is what 'Premium Bonds' in the UK are, in a form.

It certainly sounds like it, I think Levitt (see above) modelled his solution off the British system. He proposed it as a way for the US government to encourage responsible saving over gambling.

Awhile ago I about the idea of creating a penny auction website that sells Certificates of Deposit. It would be just like the silly penny auction sites now, where you pay $.01 to make a bid, and each bid increases the length of the auction. When the auction finally expires whoever has the final bid pays that price and gets the CD. Thought it would be a way to get people to transfer more wealth to savings by committing to CDs while purchasing them at discounted rates.

What's WTF about that? Are socialist, communists and poor people not a valid market? I can't speak to the other two but there are rather large markets that target poor people almost exclusively (e.g. Pawn shops).

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