Spectrumecons 7 Week Challenge – Challenge 1: Buying and Selling Game Results

Hi Everyone,

Welcome to the results post for Challenge 1: Buying and Selling Game. This post contains a video of the ‘Buying and Selling Game’ Excel Model generating the selling prices for each car for each town or city described in the initial question.

Winner determined in this video

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What is the Buying and Selling Game?

For the benefit of those who have not entered the monthly contest series, here is a brief explanation of how the game works.

Participants are required to buy goods with an allocated amount of money. They are given a choice of 6 goods and all these goods are available in any of the 5 towns or cities in the game. The buying prices of all goods are provided in the question.

The participants are then required to sell all of their goods on a future date. The selling prices for all goods in all towns or cities are not provided. Instead, the question provides a triangle distribution for the selling price of each good in each town or city. For the triangle distribution, the minimum, maximum, and mode values are provided.

The participant who has the highest profit after selling all his or her goods is the winner.

Responses to the challenge are made in the comments section of the challenge post. If several participants make the same profit, the person who entered (commented) first wins. The account with the winning entry will receive Hive equivalent to 5 times the number of participants (e.g. if challenge has 6 participants the prize will be 30 Hive (5 × 6)). The maximum prize for this challenge is 60 Hive. In addition to the winning prize, the first 12 entries are given upvotes. The most profitable buying and selling price combination is also calculated. If the winner adopts this strategy, he or she will receive an additional 5 Hive, if the prize is below 60 Hive.

The format of the required entry is explained in detail in the challenge itself.

For a more detailed explanation, you can access the challenge post using the following link.

Other challenges

There are six other challenges in the series. Below are three of them.

Results of Challenge 1

Table 1 contains the selling prices generated by the ‘Buying and Selling’ Game model for each car in each town or city.

Table 1: Selling prices of all cars in each town or city

Table 2 contains responses and the profit made by each participant.

Table 2: Participant responses and profit

The winner of challenge 1 is @diebitch. @diebitch wins 20 Hive as the challenge had 4 participants. @diebitch also earns 20 points, which contributes to determining the series winner. @tamdike earned 10 points for being 2^nd and @failingforwards earned 5 points for being 3^rd.

@diebitch won by buying 13 SUVs for $22,000 each in Rode Town for a total of $286,000. Then went on to sell these SUVs in Lain City for $32,337 each. Therefore, made a profit of 134,381 (420,381 – 286,000).

Highest possible profit

The strategy that would have generated the highest profit would have been to buy 8 Sports cars from Rode Town $34,000 each and then selling them at Streat Town for $65,218 (as generated by the model). This would have generated a profit of $249,744.

Table 3 contains the lowest buying prices, the highest selling prices and the highest profit for selling each type of car.

Table 3: Lowest buying price and highest selling price

I would also like to thank @crrdlx for participating.

Tips for future games (If you want to participate in the Buying and Selling Game monthly contest series, I strongly recommend you read this section of the post)

To achieve the best chance of winning the game (i.e. earning the highest profit). Participants need to make the best use of the information they are given. The participant should buy from the place that sells the good at the lowest price and sell at the place that will offer the highest price.

To inform the decision further, participants should also consider the mean and median prices for each good in each place. The mean and median for a triangle distribution can be calculated using the following formulae.

Mean = (Minimum + Maximum + Mode)/3

Median when Mode ≥ (maximum – minimum)/2 (i.e. mode closer to maximum) Minimum + (((maximum – minimum) × (mode – minimum))/2)^0.5

Median when Mode ≤ (maximum – minimum)/2 (i.e. mode closer to minimum) Maximum - (((maximum – minimum) × (maximum – mode))/2)^0.5

Proof Median

If you want to read any of my other posts, you can click on the links below. These links will lead you to posts containing my collection of works. These 'Collection of Works' posts have been updated to contain links to the Hive versions of my posts.

My CBA Udemy Course

The course contains over 10 hours of video, over 60 downloadable resources, over 40 multiple-choice questions, 2 sample case studies, 1 practice CBA, life time access and a certificate on completion. The course is priced at the Tier 1 price of £20. I believe it is frequently available at half-price.

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