Problem #29






A company has the policy that any employee's birthday is a holiday for the entire company. How many people should the company employ if the expected value of the total number of "people-days" (the product of the number of employees and the number of days worked) is to be maximized?

Answer the question assuming that there are 365 days in a year, that each day is equally likely to be a birthday, and that the employees have no days off except for the birthday/holidays (i.e. no weekends off).

Source: Chance magazine



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