Six friends are doing a "secret santa gift exchange". Their names are placed into a hat, and each person chooses a name randomly (without replacement) from the hat.
However, this leads to the possibility that someone chooses their own name and doesn’t get a gift! What is the expected value for the number of people who will choose their own name?
This section requires Javascript.
You are seeing this because something didn't load right. We suggest you, (a) try
refreshing the page, (b) enabling javascript if it is disabled on your browser and,
finally, (c)
loading the
non-javascript version of this page
. We're sorry about the hassle.
In general, assume that there are n people numbered 1 , 2 , … , n . Let I k denote the indicator variable for the event that the k th friend chooses his own name. Clearly, P ( I k = 1 ) = n 1 , ∀ k Let the random variable N denote the total number people choosing his own name. Clearly, N = k = 1 ∑ n I k Taking expectation of both sides and using linearity of expectations , we have E N = k = 1 ∑ n P ( I k = 1 ) = 1