Monty Hall problem

Probability Review

Published in Charles Yoe, Principles of Risk Analysis, 2019

To further illustrate the nonintuitive nature of probability, consider the so-called Monty Hall problem, which I have used in risk assessment training for years. A letter writer to Parade Magazine (Whitaker 1990) posed the following question. “Suppose you're on a game show, and you're given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who knows what is behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to you, “Do you want to pick door No. 2?” Is it to your advantage to switch your choice?”

The boomerang returns? Accounting for the impact of uncertainties on the dynamics of remanufacturing systems

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Journal Information

Published in International Journal of Production Research, 2019

Thanos E. Goltsos, Borja Ponte, Shixuan Wang, Ying Liu, Mohamed M. Naim, Aris A. Syntetos

Like in the popular Monty Hall problem (Selvin 1975), where participants must select between three doors behind which there are one car and two goats, supply chain actors do not know what is behind the ‘door’ when they receive a batch of used products. The condition of the received products has a significant impact on the operation of the supply chain, and hence on its dynamic behaviour. Unquestionably, this quality uncertainty is a crucial characteristic that differentiate closed-loop supply chain contexts from – and make them more complex than – traditional open-loop ones (Denizel, Ferguson, and Souza 2010). Indeed, we have observed that remanufacturers generally employ a single average cost per product family, which makes the profit margin obtained per unit of product strongly dependent on the quality of the returned items.

Monty Hall problem

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Probability Review

The boomerang returns? Accounting for the impact of uncertainties on the dynamics of remanufacturing systems