Fair price per door with two prizes in seven
Question
A game show has closed doors; of them hide a prize of and the remaining are empty, with no clue as to which is which. You open doors one at a time at random, never reopening one, and stop as soon as you uncover a prize. If each door you open costs , what value of makes the game fair?
Short answer
dollars. The two prize doors split the five empty ones into three gaps of equal expected size , so the expected number of doors opened is . Fairness requires , giving .
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Open the worked solutionLessons behind this question
- Expectation, Mean, and Variance
- Conditional Probability, Total Probability, and Bayes' Rule
- Worked Examples — Probability Trees, Monty Hall, and Bayesian Updating
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