Quantitative Techniques for

Managerial Decision-1
(QTMD1G21-1)
Problem Discussion Session
Problem
In GMP term I there are 50 students in a class. As part of an assignment for QTMD-1
course, each student tosses an unbiased coin 200 times and records the number of heads.
a) What is the probability that all of the students will have number of heads strictly
between 90 and 110?

b) What is the probability that at least 40 students got the number of heads strictly
between 90 and 110?

c) Suppose that 22 students got the number of heads strictly between 90 and 110 and the
rest did not. The teacher choses a sample of 12 students. What is the probability that she
gets 8 students who got the number of heads strictly between 90 and 110?

d) Suppose the teacher is asking the students one-by-one (according to their roll no.)
whether the student got the number of heads strictly between 90 and 110. What is the
probability that roll no. 3 is the first student who says she got the the number of heads
strictly between 90 and 110?
Problem
If a single bit (0 or 1) is transmitted over a noisy communications channel, it has
probability p of being incorrectly transmitted.

To improve upon the reliability of transmission, the bit is transmitted n times,

where n is odd. A decoder at the receiving end, called a majority decoder,
decides that the correct message is that carried by a majority of the received
bits.

Under a simple noise model, each bit is independently subject to being corrupted
with the same probability p. If n = 5 and p = 0.1, what is the probability that a
message consisting of one single bit is correctly received?
Problem
Mr. G buys books from two websites, say website A and website F. He orders new books
from one of the websites one by one, until one is found defective, in which case he
switches to the other. He starts with website A.
a) Assume both websites send defective books with probability 0.1. What is the
probability that the 3rd defective book received by Mr. G is the 5th one it buys?
b) Try solving the problem if for website F the probability of defectives is changed to
0.2.
Problem
A company aims to sell as many CDs as possible over the next 30 days. There are two types
of CDs, viz i) classical music and ii) rock music. The company found from the past data
that on a randomly chosen day, the probability distribution of the number of music CDs
sold of each type is as stated below. The sales of CDs across different days and different
types are independent. The number of classical music CDs sold in a day can be 0, 500 and
1000 with probabilities 0.1, 0.2 and 0.7 respectively. The number of rock music CDs sold
can be 0, 1000 and 2000 with probabilities 0.2, 0.3 and 0.5 respectively.

a)Find the probability distribution of the total number of music CDs (i.e. classical + rock)
sold on a randomly chosen day.
Problem
A company aims to sell as many CDs as possible over the next 30 days. There are two types
of CDs, viz i) classical music and ii) rock music. The company found from the past data
that on a randomly chosen day, the probability distribution of the number of music CDs
sold of each type is as stated below. The sales of CDs across different days and different
types are independent. The number of classical music CDs sold in a day can be 0, 500 and
1000 with probabilities 0.1, 0.2 and 0.7 respectively. The number of rock music CDs sold
can be 0, 1000 and 2000 with probabilities 0.2, 0.3 and 0.5 respectively.

b)What is the expected value and the standard deviation of the total number of CDs that
will be sold in the next 30 days?
Problem
Suppose that over the long run a manufacturing process produces 1% defective
items. What is the chance of getting two or more defective items in a sample
of 200 items produced by the process?
Problem
Suppose 5% of the population of Calcutta are cricket fans. How large a random sample (with
replacement) should one draw from the population if the probability of it containing at least 8 cricket
fans is 95% or more? Use both the binomial and Poisson distributions to derive the required sample
sizes.