[vuroth]

Echognome, on Oct 30 2007, 04:40 PM, said:

Game 1:
You have 10 boxes in a room, nine of them with $10,000 in them. However, one of them is the "Bankrupt" box and gives you nothing. How many boxes would you open?

Game 2:
Same set-up. Only 10 boxes, but nine of them are "prizes" and one of them is "Bankrupt". For opening up the first "prize" box, you get $1000. For each subsequent successful "prize" box you open you double your money. However, if you ever open the "Bankrupt" box, you get nothing. How many boxes would you open?

I only open 1 box either way. The power of gambling is the lure to risk your winnings against the possibility of future winnings.

Sure, if it's a mathematics exam, I calculate EV and work out risk vs potential earnings. But if it's real life, I do my darndest to NOT hand back any free cash.

V

[han]

Are you serious? If you had an 80% chance to win $1,000 and a 10% chance to lose $1,000 you would not take that bet?

[vuroth]

If I had a 100% chance to walk away with free money and a 20% chance to lose it all, you bet I'd take the free money.

I would MUCH rather walk way with the knowledge that I could probably have won more money than walk away having lost what I had.

I certainly don't expect my choice to be a popular one, but then, I've never grokked the common fascination with gambling.

V

[han]

Are there any odds where you would take the gamble? If you could pay $10 to have a 90% chance to win $100, would you take that?

[Al_U_Card]

The life and death scenario (original) is flawed because we will all die someday.

How about, you are starving to death and you have x number of boxes, one of which has a bomb in it and the others have food. You have no alternatives for getting a meal so.....(sounds like the premise for a horror flick...lol) you will certainly open a box....because you have nothing to lose and something to gain.

[vuroth]

Hannie, on Oct 31 2007, 01:00 PM, said:

Are there any odds where you would take the gamble? If you could pay $10 to have a 90% chance to win $100, would you take that?

There are undoubtably odds for which I would gamble.

And I'm sure if the odds of going bankrupt were sufficiently small that I would get greedy. I'm only human, after all.

I think the way that I look at it, winning $1000 would make me fairly happy. Would winning double the money make me twice as happy? Of course not, nowhere near. From that perspective, I'd be gambling a whole lot of happiness at having $1000 fall into my lap on very little return (happiness-wise).

For the stated cases, the chances of improving my winnings from "I won some extra cash" to "I won a life-altering amount of cash" are not very good. Ergo, I choose not to press on.

V

[EricK]

People do funny things when they are dealing with "free" money. I happened to see the end of an episode of "Deal or No Deal" a few months back. Down to the last two boxes, which were (if I remember correctly) £15,000 and £35,000, the banker offered £25,000 which the player declined.

Now how many people who had £25,000 of "spare" money would gamble £10,000 on the toss of a coin? But this is what the player was effectively doing.

[Al_U_Card]

Speaking of "Deal or no deal" (you did) I need the mathsters to tell me what the decision rule is for when to take the banker's offer. I always find that people quit too early or stay way too late.

[Echognome]

Al_U_Card, on Oct 31 2007, 11:18 AM, said:

Speaking of "Deal or no deal" (you did) I need the mathsters to tell me what the decision rule is for when to take the banker's offer. I always find that people quit too early or stay way too late.

I have only watched this show a couple of times. Of the times I watched, it seemed that the banker's offers were much worse than the EV until later in the game. That is, as the risk was lowered for the player, the banker made better offers. It was as if the setup was to try to make the player decline offers for as long as possible. I presume this makes some sense to make the show last longer.

[han]

Yeah, imagine that the banker immediately makes a great offer and the player says, "ok, I'll take it". End of the show, the audience has to go home and people watching have to stare at a blank screen until the next show starts.

[pclayton]

cherdano, on Oct 30 2007, 07:46 AM, said:

jtfanclub, on Oct 30 2007, 09:36 AM, said:

Jlall, on Oct 29 2007, 09:39 PM, said:

if the boxes were only 1000 dollars I would not open any. To get anything significant I would need to put up far too much risk, and if my risk is very small then so is my gain so it's still not worth it.

1/10,000 chance of getting killed?


Let's see. You have about a 1.5 in 1 million chance of getting killed for every mile you drive. So, unless my math is wrong, you have at least a 1/10,000 chance of getting killed every time you take a car trip of 70 miles or more.

So let's put it a different way. How far would you be willing to drive to get a thousand bucks?

I'd probably open half the boxes if I could be sure that my next of kin would get the money. Five million smackers on the average, huh? I hope that they'd appreciate it.

These numbers can't be right. A 1/100 chance of getting killed in a year of driving 7,000 miles?

Wow I've driven 200,000 miles the last 10 years. I almost got into an accident this morning, so I guess that means I'm good for at least another 100K or so.

[mike777]

cherdano, on Oct 30 2007, 10:46 AM, said:

jtfanclub, on Oct 30 2007, 09:36 AM, said:

Jlall, on Oct 29 2007, 09:39 PM, said:

if the boxes were only 1000 dollars I would not open any. To get anything significant I would need to put up far too much risk, and if my risk is very small then so is my gain so it's still not worth it.

1/10,000 chance of getting killed?


Let's see. You have about a 1.5 in 1 million chance of getting killed for every mile you drive. So, unless my math is wrong, you have at least a 1/10,000 chance of getting killed every time you take a car trip of 70 miles or more.

So let's put it a different way. How far would you be willing to drive to get a thousand bucks?

I'd probably open half the boxes if I could be sure that my next of kin would get the money. Five million smackers on the average, huh? I hope that they'd appreciate it.

These numbers can't be right. A 1/100 chance of getting killed in a year of driving 7,000 miles?

edit

Not sure if he is saying the longer your drive time/mileage without a break the greater the chance of getting killed

[FrancesHinden]

Jlall, on Nov 1 2007, 04:17 AM, said:

In bridge are you unhappy when you have AQJxx opp xxxx and fail to drop the stiff king?

A large number of years ago, I played a KO match against (what was then) a much better team. We won the match by less than the number of imps we gained on the last board. An opponent was in 6NT, which came down to bringing in a suit of

AQ9x

opposite

Kxx

she cashed the Ace and King, and the J and 10 were played on her right.

She didn't finesse the 9 on the third round but unsuccessfully played for the drop. Her stated reasoning was "I just couldn't bear to finesse into J109"

[helene_t]

Jlall, on Oct 31 2007, 01:19 AM, said:

ok guess helene beat me to it, I am surprised you are such a sick gambler though haha. Most people are very risk averse with stuff like this, maybe you're just rich

Hey, was that remark directed at me? I'm probably sick but I'm neither a gambler nor rich.

[vuroth]

Jlall, on Oct 31 2007, 10:17 PM, said:

So effectively you're saying you're not a rational person, as you can certainly change the amount of happiness/unhappiness you have by changing your thinking about a situation.

In bridge are you unhappy when you have AQJxx opp xxxx and fail to drop the stiff king?

At the bridge table, willfully chosing to receive less than the optimum result is irrational. On a math test, I'd be computing the estimated value for each choice and maximizing my options.

Life isn't about maximizing your estimated value. My personal values, history and financial situation would all factor into my decision.

V

[mycroft]

"optimum" is a very interesting word.

A key to bridge is knowing when to take a safety play - i.e. "willfully choosing to receive less than the optimum result" (at least 95% of the time) as insurance against a disastrous result the other 5%.

Matchpoint strategy also avoids the optimum (on a particular hand) - gambling -100 or -1100 vs an expected -120, for instance. As long as you get 2 or 3 -100s for every -1100 you get, you win at matchpoints, but is it "optimum"?

How many times have you heard "The chances were pretty much equivalent - within 5% or so - but since if I finesse and it works, I make my slam, but if I squeeze and it works, I have a story to tell for months, no way am I finessing"? or "why did I choose to finesse him rather than her? Because it's so much fun to 'get' him"? These are all playing for the optimum result - it's just that that result is more than just the numbers on the scoresheet.

This is one of the magics of bridge, to me - the right answer is sometimes right for reasons that make no sense until you look deeply.

Michael.

[barmar]

My feeling about Deal or No Deal is that I would probably not take the deal as long as there are at least two 5-digit amounts still in play (and maybe if there's one 5-digit and a few 4-digits). I don't go on a game show to win the "expected value", I'm there to get a boatload of cash. If I don't win at least $10K, I don't really care whether I win $1,000, $250, or $1 -- none of those lower amounts really make a difference in my life.

I can certainly understand the player who stayed in when he was down to $15K and $35K. Sure, $25K is better than $15K, but if he walked away with only $15K he'd be extremely happy, so he doesn't mind risking that $10K for the possibility of getting $35K. I probably wouldn't take the deal unless the banker offered $30K. On the other hand, if I were down to $35K and $1, and he offered $15K, I'd take the deal, and might even take a $10K deal. As I said, the logic is that I want to be sure to get a decent prize, but anything on top of that is gravy.

I'm not sure how to relate this to the original problem, though. On a game show everything you get is found money, the only thing you're risking is a day of your time, and you're having fun as well. But when there's a downside where you can end up with less than you started with, or lose your life entirely, the logic is very different.

[han]

FrancesHinden, on Nov 1 2007, 08:59 AM, said:

Jlall, on Nov 1 2007, 04:17 AM, said:

In bridge are you unhappy when you have AQJxx opp xxxx and fail to drop the stiff king?

A large number of years ago, I played a KO match against (what was then) a much better team. We won the match by less than the number of imps we gained on the last board. An opponent was in 6NT, which came down to bringing in a suit of

AQ9x

opposite

Kxx

she cashed the Ace and King, and the J and 10 were played on her right.

She didn't finesse the 9 on the third round but unsuccessfully played for the drop. Her stated reasoning was "I just couldn't bear to finesse into J109"

I think you meant to write 8 instead of the 9.