Saturday, January 02, 2010

Winning the holiday gift

During the holiday season, it is very typical for a corporate to hold a party for its employees. During the party, one activity is to win the prizes with the raffle tickets.

Say each employee is distributed with 20 tickets in a raffle with 80 prizes. Which gives you a better chance of winning: putting all of your tickets in one of 80 baskets (your favorite item) or spreading them among 20 baskets with each ticket in one basket?

This seems to be a probability issue. There is an answer from AskMarilyn for the similar issue:

If you can see the baskets and tickets, you should wait until the last minute and then put all of your tickets in the basket that appears to contain the fewest tickets. If you can't see the tickets, put all your tickets in the basket for the least-desirable prize. But if you can't see the tickets and the prizes are equal, it doesn't matter what you do.

In previous year, I won nothing because I put all my raffles in a couple of hot items (there are thousands tickets in the boxes for these hot items). This year, I changed the strategy and put my tickets in the basket with the fewest tickets. I won a digital photo cube. Digital photo cube is not my favorite item, but I demonstrated how changing the strategy could increase the possibility of winning.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Love this blog. Keep them coming. Thank you.