Bob, the proprietor of Midway Lumber, bases his projections for the annual revenues of the company on the performance of the housing market. He rates the performance of the market as very strong, strong, normal, weak, or very weak. For the next year, Bob estimates that the probabilities for these outcomes are 0.15, 0.25, 0.39, 0.09, and 0.12, respectively. He also thinks that the revenues corresponding to these outcomes are $23, $18.6, $16.9, $14, and $6 million, respectively. What is Bob's expected revenue for next year?
Continuous Probability Distributions
Probability distributions are of two types, which are continuous probability distributions and discrete probability distributions. A continuous probability distribution contains an infinite number of values. For example, if time is infinite: you could count from 0 to a trillion seconds, billion seconds, so on indefinitely. A discrete probability distribution consists of only a countable set of possible values.
Normal Distribution
Suppose we had to design a bathroom weighing scale, how would we decide what should be the range of the weighing machine? Would we take the highest recorded human weight in history and use that as the upper limit for our weighing scale? This may not be a great idea as the sensitivity of the scale would get reduced if the range is too large. At the same time, if we keep the upper limit too low, it may not be usable for a large percentage of the population!
Bob, the proprietor of Midway Lumber, bases his projections for the annual revenues of the company on the performance of the housing market. He rates the performance of the market as very strong, strong, normal, weak, or very weak. For the next year, Bob estimates that the probabilities for these outcomes are 0.15, 0.25, 0.39, 0.09, and 0.12, respectively. He also thinks that the revenues corresponding to these outcomes are $23, $18.6, $16.9, $14, and $6 million, respectively. What is Bob's expected revenue for next year?
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