Monday MBA Math: Probability
The Monday MBA Math series helps prospective MBA students to self assess their proficiency with the quantitative building blocks of the MBA first year curriculum.
Probability is a language for dealing with uncertainty. Like any language, it has structure and rules that take practice to internalize.
This exercise is at its core a simple logic challenge.
Uncertainty permeates business. While qualitative reasoning is essential to clarify appropriate strategy and tactics, high quality decision making often requires familiarity with probability to weight the consequences of possible futures associated with various choices.
Exercise:
Let X be a discrete random variable. If Pr(X<5) = 2/9, and Pr(X<=5) = 5/18, then what is Pr(X=5)?
Solution (with audio commentary): click here
Prof. Peter Regan created the self-paced, online MBA Math quantitative skills course and teaches live MBA courses at Dartmouth (Tuck), Duke (Fuqua), and Cornell (Johnson).


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