Why I don't play McDonald's Monopoly

www-stat.stanford.edu

3 points·white_eskimo··3 comments

McDonalds monopoly doesn't work that way. If it was random, they couldn't limit the number of prizes that could potentially pay out. It would be trivial to set up an online trading forum and get the tiles you needed. Instead, there are "magic tiles". For example, everyone gets "Park place" but no one gets "Boardwalk" because there's only one (or an extremely limited number).

I think there are 5 concurrent games running. Just figure out the 5 tiles that win these games and watch for them. It will be easy to get the others in that set if you get one of the winners.

You are absolutely right in pointing out the lack of uniform probability distribution across the different pieces in McDonald's Monopoly game.

My goal in sharing the link above was to show that McDonald's Monopoly game is significantly more costly to win when compared to the Coupon Collector's Problem, which has an expected cost of O(n log n).

Still though, I think its pretty interesting that the folks who run the McDonald's Monopoly game have to factor in economics when setting up all of the probabilities as pieces get traded over the Internet (which is against the rules, but still happens as in http://cgi.ebay.com/2009-McDonalds-Monopoly-NORTH-CAROLINA-A...)

Really? If I thought my chances were THAT good I would definitely play...

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