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The odds of winning a prize at a company Christmas party?
I asked this before and gave too many details, which led to a discussion that had nothing to do with the question.
Here are the facts:
The company has 30 employees, 10 of whom have been with the company 15 years or more. Each year for 20 years, there are 20 employees there, but not always the same 20 employees attend. There are several prizes given away, but each year there is just one grand prize (a TV).
What are the odds of two employees winning the TV twice?
(These two employees ARE among those who have been with the company for 15 years or more.)
What are the odds each year of somebody winning who has never won before? Are their odds any better than somebody who HAS already won the TV?
The winner is chosen from names written on slips of paper, drawn from a basket and read out loud. The first name drawn wins the grand prize. This question is assuming there is no foul play, such as names being withheld, or a name read that is not on the slip of paper, etc...
Pat, your answer makes sense. However, what if the longer-term people never have won? This has actually happened, and it seems to me that the odds of that are almost impossible. If something is repeated each year, doesn't it stand to reason, as you said, that those who have been to more parties would have a greater chance of actually winning at least once?
2 Answers
- Pat SLv 61 decade agoFavorite Answer
Everyone's odds are exactly the same every year. How long they've been with the company has nothing to do with it.
The longer-term people have participated in more drawings, and obviously will have won more prizes, including the big one. But that's all in the past. With each fresh drawing, everyone starts out equal.
In chance events such as this, what happened in the past has no bearing whatsoever on what will happen in the future.
- lamprouLv 45 years ago
the percentages are 2 out of three for prevailing a prize as long as there are 30 workers and 20 prizes; or sixty six.sixty six%. i think of the ultimate thank you to choose for the winners could be to have the laptop programmer write up a random software to spew out winnners' names one by one for the prizes in the descending order.
