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|title=Lotteries in Public Life

|author=Peter Stone (editor)

|publisher=Imprint Academic

|date=August 2011

|summary=This collection of essays must be considered as one of the key texts on the subject of using lotteries to decide upon issues in public life, exploring as it does almost every significant paper published between 1959 and 1998 on the theory of lotteries. But it is also a text which will inspire the reader to a consideration of the role of chance and randomness in all forms of decision making, and indeed to consider the whole process of how we make up our minds.

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Peter Stone's reader is an examination not so much of examples of lotteries in public life, but of the theoretical and conceptual issues which the use of 'sortation' in decision taking raises. There are essays here about the use of the lottery in politics, in allocating scarce resources (such as school places or human organs) and even on the problems of defining the lottery and the methods for assuring fairness. Because lotteries are used in many societies to resolve issues and perhaps because of recent discussion of the use of the lottery to allocate school places, this is a hot issue which raises fundamental questions about democracy and choice.