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Investing

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Submitted By ERICJOHN
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Yahoo, Warren Buffett and $1 Billion Contest
Eric J. McGlashing
Feb 10, 2014

TOPICS: Insurance, Risk and uncertainty

SUMMARY: A lawsuit involving Yahoo sheds light on the insurance policies that enable contest prizes like the $1 billion Warren Buffett is offering to anybody who predicts the winner of every March Madness basketball game.

CLASSROOM APPLICATION: Students can struggle with framing the problem of the uncertainty involved in calculating expected payment and the risk involved in offering a prize for correctly picking the NCAA basket tournament bracket winners. Students can work on a simplified problem of a four-team tournament (as opposed to a 64-plus team tournament) and a small number of fans choosing the winners. Students should be forced to think about the distributions of the fans' probabilistic beliefs about the game winners.

QUESTIONS:
1. (Advanced) Suppose in a tournament game between teams i and j that team i is expected to beat team j with probability p. What is the value of p for each of the tournament's games that make it least likely that a gambler can correctly pick of the tournament's winners?

2. (Introductory) Suppose in round 1 of the tournament that one and only one lower-seeded team is going to win a game. What is the probability that a gambler will correctly pick the one team?

3. (Advanced) What is the probability that any one fan will correctly pick all bracket winners? What is the probability that at least one of four fans will correctly pick all bracket winners? Work with a simplified problem of two-team, one-game tournament in which the person answering this question does not know with the certainty each gambler's probabilistic belief that team i will be team j. Good luck!

Everyone knows of Warren Buffets $1 billion cash prize to whoever predicts the winners of all 63 NCAA games during March Madness. What you

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