Best queue position for a shared-birthday prize
Question
A cinema gives a free ticket to the first person in the queue whose birthday is the same as someone already ahead of them in the queue. Birthdays are independent and uniform over days. You may pick your place in line. Which position maximises your chance of winning?
Short answer
Position . Position wins if the first birthdays are all different and yours matches one of them: . The ratio exceeds only while , so the maximum () is at .
Adapted from Zhou, A Practical Guide to Quantitative Finance Interviews, sec. 4.3 Conditional Probability and Bayes' Formula, 'Birthday line', p.75; question and answer rewritten by SelfMadeQuant.com.
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Open the worked solutionLessons behind this question
- Conditional Probability, Total Probability, and Bayes' Rule
- Worked Examples — Probability Trees, Monty Hall, and Bayesian Updating
- Optimisation Problems
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