Re: Restaurant wait time question?
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My roommate's stats prof asked his class a question and offered $10 to anyone who can come up with the correct answer by next class. I'm not sure if there is a correct answer, so I thought I'd post it here to get your opinion.
When you get to a restaurant, the hostess tells you that the median wait time is 15 minutes. After 5 minutes, what will be your average wait time?
That's all the information we were given. To me, it seems as though there cannot be a single correct answer because you cannot directly relate the median and the mean. It seems to me that you would need to make additional assumptions. Am I missing something here?
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It's probably about 11 Minutes left. Assume there is an even distribution bell curve centered on 15. So you will get called the same percent of the time in the first 5 minutes as you will in the 25th minute.
So if we give it a small percent chace of happening - say 3%, that means the other 97% of the time your wait will be longer than 5 minutes.
Figuring out an even distrbution - and then dividing it by the 97% of the time this distribution comes into play - the 5 Minutes you already have waited puts you between 10 and 11 minutes left of waiting.
I got 10.4 minutes, but it's based on actual numbers you plug in.
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