You want to do a psychological experiment. On any given day, there is a 30% chance that your participant won’t show up. In addition, there is a 10% chance that

Question

You want to do a psychological experiment. On any given day, there is a 30% chance that your participant won’t show up. In addition, there is a 10% chance that the stimulus presentation software won’t work. There is also a 5% chance that there is a problem with saving the data and a 3% chance that there are other problems like experimenter error. For the sake of simplicity, you can assume that all these events are independent. What is the probability that you will be able to do a successful experiment (be able to record useful data) on any given day?

Answer 1

70% chance the participant shows up.

90% chance the software works.

95% chance the data saves.

97% change of being error free.

 

The product is .7 * .9 * .95 * .97 = .580545 = 58.0545 % chance of a completely successful experiment.

 

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Just out of blunt curiosity, I'm willing to bet that if the client shows up,

the probability is much higher. That is, ATTENDANCE is the problem.

Let's bump that probability up a lot say, 90%.

 

Now it is .9 * .9 * .95 * .97 = .76415 = 76.415%

That's over 18% increase (almost 2 letter grades)

 

Hence the reason for No Show Fees