The NFL season is well underway. Your office is starting a pool where you have t
ID: 3298402 • Letter: T
Question
The NFL season is well underway. Your office is starting a pool where you have to guess which teams in each division will finish first. You are currently working on the AFC East. Based on their results to date, you estimate that the Patriots have a 50% chance of finishing first in the division and that the Jets and Bills each have a 25% chance. Since you want to really do well in the office pool, you check with the odds makers in Vegas. They have been 75% accurate in their past predictions and tell you that the Patriots will win the division. What are your revised probabilities after receiving this information?
Explanation / Answer
As we are given that they are 75% accurate, therefore the probability that Patriots would win given that they said that patriot would win would be 0.75.
Now Jets and Bills have initially equal probabilities of winning. Therefore the rest 0.25 probability would be equally divided between them. Therefore the revised probabilities would be computed as:
P( Patriots win ) = 0.75
P( Jets win ) = 0.25/ 2 = 0.125
P( Bills win ) = 0.25/ 2 = 0.125