Flight Overbook

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User Generated

Subject

Statistics

School

Brandman University

Course

MATH 203

Type

Homework

Uploaded By

Znqvanovyn099

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Calculating Binomial Probabilities - Suppose you work for an airline and you are taking

reservations for a flight on an aircraft that has 152 seats. You know, based on historical flights trends,

that if you sell a single ticket there is a 91% chance that the person with the ticket will actually show

up for the flight. You decide to try to make a little extra money by overbooking your flight and you sell

160 tickets hoping that not more than 152 people will actually show up for the flight (note: this is a

common business practice! Click here to watch a video that explains why)

Explain how this scenario meets the four requirements in the definition of a Binomial Distribution

(page 200)

Identify what n and p are in this example

Use technology (StatCrunch, Statdisk, or Excel) to calculate the probability that if you sell 160 tickets

for your flight, more passengers will show up than there are seats available (again, the plane has

152 seats total). Post an image of your technology output using the Insert/Edit Image feature in

Blackboard (no attachments!)

Based on this probability, do you think it is a wise business practice to oversell your flight in this

manner? Explain.

-----------------------------

Four requirements in the definition of a binomial distribution are

1. The experiment consists of n identical trials.

2. Each trial results in one of the two outcomes, called success and failure.

3. The probability of success, denoted p, remains the same from trial to trial.

4. The n trials are independent. That is, the outcome of any trial does not affect the outcome of the

others.

a. For our scenario, 160 sold tickets are identical (because we don’t care about other, but only if the

passengers who bought the ticket show up), then n=160, i.e., this experiment consist 160 identical

trials.

b. For each sold tickets, there are only two outcomes, passenger show up or not show up . Hence,

the second requirement is satisfied.

c. Since from the past data each passenger with ticket has probability of 91% to show up, this

probability is the same for all sold ticket, therefore p=0.91 for all the tickets the scenario meets the

third requirement.

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Calculating Binomial Probabilities - Suppose you work for an airline and you are taking reservations for a flight on an aircraft that has 152 seats. You know, based on historical flights trends, that if you sell a single ticket there is a 91% chance that the person with the ticket will actually show up for the flight. You decide to try to make a little extra money by overbooking your flight and you sell 160 tickets hoping that not more than 152 people will actually show up for the flight (note: this is a common business practice! Click here to watch a video that explains why) Explain how this ...
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Tags: airline Binomial Distribution binomial probabilities Flight Reservation Calculating