Expected letters reaching the right firm at random
Question
You have written cover letters, one for a recruiter at each of firms, but have lost track of which letter belongs to which firm. You send exactly one letter to each firm, matching them by a uniformly random permutation. What is the expected number of letters that arrive at the firm they were written for?
Short answer
. Each letter lands at its intended firm with probability . Summing these indicator expectations over all letters, which needs no independence, gives for every .
Adapted from QuantQuestions.io; question and answer rewritten by SelfMadeQuant.com.
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Open the worked solutionLessons behind this question
- Expectation, Mean, and Variance
- Conditional Expectation and Variance Revisited
- Sample Spaces, Events, and the Probability Axioms
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