A contractor submits a bid on a project for which more research and development work needs to be done. It is estimated that the total cost of satisfying the project specifications will be $20 million plus the cost of the further research and development work. The contractor views the cost of this additional work as a random variable with a mean of $4 million and a standard deviation of $1 million. The contractor wishes to submit a bid such that his expected profit will be 10% of his expected costs. What should be the bid? If this bid is accepted, what will be the standard deviation of the profit made by the project?
Continuous Probability Distributions
Probability distributions are of two types, which are continuous probability distributions and discrete probability distributions. A continuous probability distribution contains an infinite number of values. For example, if time is infinite: you could count from 0 to a trillion seconds, billion seconds, so on indefinitely. A discrete probability distribution consists of only a countable set of possible values.
Normal Distribution
Suppose we had to design a bathroom weighing scale, how would we decide what should be the range of the weighing machine? Would we take the highest recorded human weight in history and use that as the upper limit for our weighing scale? This may not be a great idea as the sensitivity of the scale would get reduced if the range is too large. At the same time, if we keep the upper limit too low, it may not be usable for a large percentage of the population!
A contractor submits a bid on a project for which more research and development work needs to be done. It is estimated that the total cost of satisfying the project specifications will be $20 million plus the cost of the further research and development work. The contractor views the cost of this additional work as a random variable with a mean of $4 million and a standard deviation of $1 million. The contractor wishes to submit a bid such that his expected profit will be 10% of his expected costs. What should be the bid? If this bid is accepted, what will be the standard deviation of the profit made by the project?
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