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-   -   Giving Two Percentages One Value under the same entity (https://www.askmehelpdesk.com/showthread.php?t=442491)

  • Feb 2, 2010, 10:03 PM
    lvv328
    Giving Two Percentages One Value under the same entity
    Say that I have one entity that has two traits that have percentages of activating, we will put it in terms of money.

    20% chance of $27
    31% chance of $9

    How do I put this into one value so that I can compare this entity to other entities that have only one trait available such as:

    94% chance of $8
  • Feb 3, 2010, 11:17 AM
    ebaines

    Not sure I totally understand the question, but let me suggest this:

    If you know the probability of each possible outcome, you can calculate an "expected value" for the process and then compare that. In your example you have 20% chance of $27 and 31% chance of $9. You don't tell us what happens the other 49% of the time, and for this to work we need to have probabilities that add to 1. For the sake of the example - if I assume that there is a 49% chance of $0, then the expected value is:

    0.20 * $27 + 0.31* $9 + 0.49 * $0 = $8.19

    This means if you run this process many times over, your average return for each run is expected to be $8.19.

    Does this help?
  • Feb 3, 2010, 04:48 PM
    lvv328

    Thanks! That did help a lot. I was not considering that there could be a possibility of a 0 amount.

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