Comments on: The Money Animal Marketplace Was The Most Fun I Had Doing Math This Summer

By: Gilbert

Gilbert — Thu, 02 Oct 2014 00:46:28 +0000

You could go even deeper on this question with behavioral economics. Why is everyone behaving irrationally in the way they are?

Your setup isn’t all that different from Kahneman and Tversky’s classic prospect theory studies.

By: End of week links « Healthcare Economist

End of week links « Healthcare Economist — Fri, 26 Sep 2014 03:42:39 +0000

[…] The money duck. […]

By: Julie

Julie — Mon, 15 Sep 2014 04:42:22 +0000

What a fun way to engage your students and have them learn by doing! Reading this blog post made me want to sit down and write up a business model of my own. We all know that getting students involved is the best way to help them learn. Kudos! You’re doing a great job.

By: Dan Meyer

Dan Meyer — Sat, 13 Sep 2014 14:49:18 +0000

Love the introduction of time.

There were about 40 customers who made three purchases each. So we aren’t yet close to the “expected” part of “expected value.” Lots could go wrong.

By: Ian D

Ian D — Fri, 12 Sep 2014 22:42:32 +0000

Nice post!

For the actual profit how many customers were you using in the simulator?

It’s also good to consider what happens if the customers get hooked on buying ducks and then we could consider the time to ruin for an initial stake of say 2 ducks, where the customer reinvests the profits into the duck gambling enterprise. Some questions could be:

1. What is the expected time for a customer to go bust?
2. What is the median time to go bust?
3. For 10,000 customers what is the maximum time that it takes a customer to go bust?

For the duck company to be like a casino it would like a high expected time to ruin (to entice the customers), but a low median (to milk most of them dry quickly). Some quick simulations from 10000 from a quickly written bit of code:

Let’s assume that ruin is where the amount of money owned is negative, given a customer starts with the money for two ducks.

Real duck company:
expected time to ruin 3.093
median 3
maximum time playing 14

Panda
expected time to ruin 68.03
median 7
maximum playing time 13185

Penguin
expected time to ruin 6.513
median 3
maximum playing time 101

So, Panda would probably do quite well providing it can make enough ducks to sell to the very few individuals who get lucky. There is perhaps some danger that the Panda company may get taken themselves to the cleaners. I think I would prefer choose to set up like the Penguin company.

By: Robert Kaplinsky

Robert Kaplinsky — Fri, 12 Sep 2014 12:37:21 +0000

Wow! I had no idea someone actually was able to get the information on the money in the money duck. Well done Clayton! That is one critical piece of information that takes this task to the next level. Very cool.

By: Kyle Pearce

Kyle Pearce — Thu, 11 Sep 2014 15:22:05 +0000

Love this task!

I used to teach a grade 12 stats course and this would have really livened up our unit on probability distributions.

You challenged us at OAME 2014 in Toronto to come up with some way to use that money duck; although most said “expected value,” I don’t think anyone there could see it developing into such a rich task.

Thanks for the share. Just sent on to some stats teachers in my board.