Concept explainers
In this version of “dice blackjack,” you toss a single die repeatedly and add up the sum of your dice tosses. Your goal is to come as close as possible to a total of 7 without going over. You may stop at any time. If your total is 8 or more, you lose. If your total is 7 or less, the “house” then tosses the die repeatedly. The house stops as soon as its total is 4 or more. If the house totals 8 or more, you win. Otherwise, the higher total wins. If there is a tie, the house wins. Consider the following strategies:
- Keep tossing until your total is 3 or more.
- Keep tossing until your total is 4 or more.
- Keep tossing until your total is 5 or more.
- Keep tossing until your total is 6 or more.
- Keep tossing until your total is 7 or more.
For example, suppose you keep tossing until your total is 4 or more. Here are some examples of how the game might go:
- You toss a 2 and then a 3 and stop for total of 5. The house tosses a 3 and then a 2. You lose because a tie goes to the house.
- You toss a 3 and then a 6. You lose.
- You toss a 6 and stop. The house tosses a 3 and then a 2. You win.
- You toss a 3 and then a 4 for total of 7. The house tosses a 3 and then a 5. You win.
Note that only 4 tosses need to be generated for the house, but more tosses might need to be generated for you, depending on your strategy. Develop a simulation and run it for at least 1000 iterations for each of the strategies listed previously. For each strategy, what are the two values so that you are 95% sure that your probability of winning is between these two values? Which of the five strategies appears to be best?
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Chapter 11 Solutions
Practical Management Science
- Based on Kelly (1956). You currently have 100. Each week you can invest any amount of money you currently have in a risky investment. With probability 0.4, the amount you invest is tripled (e.g., if you invest 100, you increase your asset position by 300), and, with probability 0.6, the amount you invest is lost. Consider the following investment strategies: Each week, invest 10% of your money. Each week, invest 30% of your money. Each week, invest 50% of your money. Use @RISK to simulate 100 weeks of each strategy 1000 times. Which strategy appears to be best in terms of the maximum growth rate? (In general, if you can multiply your investment by M with probability p and lose your investment with probability q = 1 p, you should invest a fraction [p(M 1) q]/(M 1) of your money each week. This strategy maximizes the expected growth rate of your fortune and is known as the Kelly criterion.) (Hint: If an initial wealth of I dollars grows to F dollars in 100 weeks, the weekly growth rate, labeled r, satisfies F = (I + r)100, so that r = (F/I)1/100 1.)arrow_forwardYou now have 5000. You will toss a fair coin four times. Before each toss you can bet any amount of your money (including none) on the outcome of the toss. If heads comes up, you win the amount you bet. If tails comes up, you lose the amount you bet. Your goal is to reach 15,000. It turns out that you can maximize your chance of reaching 15,000 by betting either the money you have on hand or 15,000 minus the money you have on hand, whichever is smaller. Use simulation to estimate the probability that you will reach your goal with this betting strategy.arrow_forwardYou now have 10,000, all of which is invested in a sports team. Each year there is a 60% chance that the value of the team will increase by 60% and a 40% chance that the value of the team will decrease by 60%. Estimate the mean and median value of your investment after 50 years. Explain the large difference between the estimated mean and median.arrow_forward
- Consider the following card game. The player and dealer each receive a card from a 52-card deck. At the end of the game the player with the highest card wins; a tie goes to the dealer. (You can assume that Aces count 1, Jacks 11, Queens 12, and Kings 13.) After the player receives his card, he keeps the card if it is 7 or higher. If the player does not keep the card, the player and dealer swap cards. Then the dealer keeps his current card (which might be the players original card) if it is 9 or higher. If the dealer does not keep his card, he draws another card. Use simulation with at least 1000 iterations to estimate the probability that the player wins. (Hint: See the file Sampling Without Replacement.xlsx, one of the example files, to see a clever way of simulating cards from a deck so that the Same card is never dealt more than once.)arrow_forwardYou have 5 and your opponent has 10. You flip a fair coin and if heads comes up, your opponent pays you 1. If tails comes up, you pay your opponent 1. The game is finished when one player has all the money or after 100 tosses, whichever comes first. Use simulation to estimate the probability that you end up with all the money and the probability that neither of you goes broke in 100 tosses.arrow_forwardThe IRR is the discount rate r that makes a project have an NPV of 0. You can find IRR in Excel with the built-in IRR function, using the syntax =IRR(range of cash flows). However, it can be tricky. In fact, if the IRR is not near 10%, this function might not find an answer, and you would get an error message. Then you must try the syntax =IRR(range of cash flows, guess), where guess" is your best guess for the IRR. It is best to try a range of guesses (say, 90% to 100%). Find the IRR of the project described in Problem 34. 34. Consider a project with the following cash flows: year 1, 400; year 2, 200; year 3, 600; year 4, 900; year 5, 1000; year 6, 250; year 7, 230. Assume a discount rate of 15% per year. a. Find the projects NPV if cash flows occur at the ends of the respective years. b. Find the projects NPV if cash flows occur at the beginnings of the respective years. c. Find the projects NPV if cash flows occur at the middles of the respective years.arrow_forward
- The game of Chuck-a-Luck is played as follows: You pick a number between 1 and 6 and toss three dice. If your number does not appear, you lose 1. If your number appears x times, you win x. On the average, use simulation to find the average amount of money you will win or lose on each play of the game.arrow_forwardIf you want to replicate the results of a simulation model with Excel functions only, not @RISK, you can build a data table and let the column input cell be any blank cell. Explain why this works.arrow_forwardIt is surprising (but true) that if 23 people are in the same room, there is about a 50% chance that at least two people will have the same birthday. Suppose you want to estimate the probability that if 30 people are in the same room, at least two of them will have the same birthday. You can proceed as follows. a. Generate random birthdays for 30 different people. Ignoring the possibility of a leap year, each person has a 1/365 chance of having a given birthday (label the days of the year 1 to 365). You can use the RANDBETWEEN function to generate birthdays. b. Once you have generated 30 peoples birthdays, how can you tell whether at least two people have the same birthday? One way is to use Excels RANK function. (You can learn how to use this function in Excels online help.) This function returns the rank of a number relative to a given group of numbers. In the case of a tie, two numbers are given the same rank. For example, if the set of numbers is 4, 3, 2, 5, the RANK function returns 2, 3, 4, 1. (By default, RANK gives 1 to the largest number.) If the set of numbers is 4, 3, 2, 4, the RANK function returns 1, 3, 4, 1. c. After using the RANK function, you should be able to determine whether at least two of the 30 people have the same birthday. What is the (estimated) probability that this occurs?arrow_forward
- Suppose you begin year 1 with 5000. At the beginning of each year, you put half of your money under a mattress and invest the other half in Whitewater stock. During each year, there is a 40% chance that the Whitewater stock will double, and there is a 60% chance that you will lose half of your investment. To illustrate, if the stock doubles during the first year, you will have 3750 under the mattress and 3750 invested in Whitewater during year 2. You want to estimate your annual return over a 30-year period. If you end with F dollars, your annual return is (F/5000)1/30 1. For example, if you end with 100,000, your annual return is 201/30 1 = 0.105, or 10.5%. Run 1000 replications of an appropriate simulation. Based on the results, you can be 95% certain that your annual return will be between which two values?arrow_forwardIn the financial world, there are many types of complex instruments called derivatives that derive their value from the value of an underlying asset. Consider the following simple derivative. A stocks current price is 80 per share. You purchase a derivative whose value to you becomes known a month from now. Specifically, let P be the price of the stock in a month. If P is between 75 and 85, the derivative is worth nothing to you. If P is less than 75, the derivative results in a loss of 100(75-P) dollars to you. (The factor of 100 is because many derivatives involve 100 shares.) If P is greater than 85, the derivative results in a gain of 100(P-85) dollars to you. Assume that the distribution of the change in the stock price from now to a month from now is normally distributed with mean 1 and standard deviation 8. Let EMV be the expected gain/loss from this derivative. It is a weighted average of all the possible losses and gains, weighted by their likelihoods. (Of course, any loss should be expressed as a negative number. For example, a loss of 1500 should be expressed as -1500.) Unfortunately, this is a difficult probability calculation, but EMV can be estimated by an @RISK simulation. Perform this simulation with at least 1000 iterations. What is your best estimate of EMV?arrow_forwardThe customer loyalty model in Example 11.9 assumes that once a customer leaves (becomes disloyal), that customer never becomes loyal again. Assume instead that there are two probabilities that drive the model, the retention rate and the rejoin rate, with values 0.75 and 0.15, respectively. The simulation should follow a customer who starts as a loyal customer in year 1. From then on, at the end of any year when the customer was loyal, this customer remains loyal for the next year with probability equal to the retention rate. But at the end of any year the customer is disloyal, this customer becomes loyal the next year with probability equal to the rejoin rate. During the customers nth loyal year with the company, the companys mean profit from this customer is the nth value in the mean profit list in column B. Keep track of the same two outputs as in the example, and also keep track of the number of times the customer rejoins.arrow_forward
- Practical Management ScienceOperations ManagementISBN:9781337406659Author:WINSTON, Wayne L.Publisher:Cengage,