Buying and Selling Game Contest #14 – Christmas Special

Hi Everyone,

Welcome to the ‘Buying and Selling’ Game.

This is the Christmas version of the ‘Buying and Selling Game’ Contest. This version of the game is going to be a little different from the previous version. I have made six minor changes. These are one-off changes, which I hope makes the game feel a little more festive as well as puts us all in the mood for sharing and giving. See changes below.

The number of goods available to buy has increased from 6 to 12.
The contest will be open for 12 days instead of 6 days.
The prize money will be equivalent to the game winnings instead of a fixed value such as 30 Hive.
On entry, each participant can choose to donate a portion of his or her winnings to a nominated Hive User.
The participant who donates the highest value wins the game.
All entries will be upvoted.

How to play the Christmas version of the ‘Buying and Selling’ Game?

The Christmas version of the ‘Buying and Selling’ Game involves five simple steps.

Choose one or more of twelve goods to buy.
Choose the town where you will be buying these goods.
Choose the town where you will be selling these goods.
Choose a Hive User you wish to donate a portion of your winnings to if you should win the contest.
Choose the percentage of your winnings you would donate to that Hive User.

All the information you need to know to play the game is provided in the question; i.e. no external research is required as all prices are hypothetical and locations are fictitious.

All entries must be made in the comments section of this post.

Each account is only permitted one entry.

How to win?

The winner of the Christmas version of the ‘Buying and Selling’ Game, is the person who donates the most money from their winnings. This involves a careful trade-off, donating a higher percentage of your winnings gives you a higher chance of winning but your winnings will be reduced. For example, if you choose to donate 60% of your winnings and your profit is 50 Hive, your donation score will be 30 Hive. If you win, you will receive 20 Hive and the user you donate to will receive 30 Hive.

If two participants donate the same amount of money, the participant that made the highest profit wins. If this also results in a tie, the participant who entered first would win.

Game assumptions

All goods of the same type are identical; for example, Good A bought in Town X is the same as Good A bought in Town Y.

There are zero transaction and transport costs.

All towns use the cryptocurrency Hive.

What information is provided?

All the towns are provided.
All the goods that can be bought in the game are provided.
All the buying prices of the goods are provided.
None of the selling prices of the goods are provided. Instead, a possible range of prices is provided. This range is represented by maximum, minimum, and mode prices (i.e. most frequently occurring price). See diagram below.

Selling Price Distribution

Note: Triangular Distribution

How are the results of the game determined?

Microsoft Excel Models will be used to determine the selling prices of each good in each town. These prices will be used to calculate the profits made by each participant. In the results post, the calculation of the selling price will be presented in a video. Below is the results post for Contest 13.

Contest Prizes

For the account with the winning entry, the nominated percentage of winnings will be given to the account nominated in the entry and the remainder of the winnings will be given to the winning account. For example, if you choose to donate 40% of your winnings and your profit is 50 Hive, you will receive 30 Hive and the user you donate to will receive 20 Hive. All entries will be upvoted.

Let the contest begin

For this Christmas Contest, buying and selling will take place between towns. These towns specialise in Christmas items.

For this contest, participants have been allocated 100 Hive to buy 1 or more Christmas items from any of the 5 fictitious Christmas towns. These towns are as follows:

Chuckles Town
Merryville
Tower Town
Festiville
Winter Hill

See map below:

Map of Towns

All the Christmas items are available in all 5 towns. The available Christmas items are as follows:

Puddings
Cakes
Christmas Trees
Pies
Wrapping Paper
Tinsel
Candy
Candles
Vegetables
Stockings
Fairy Lights
Gingerbread

Table 1 contains the prices of the Christmas items for each town

Table 1: Prices of Christmas items for each town

Note: Christmas items can only be bought as whole pieces. For example, a participant could only buy 1 Christmas Tree from Chuckles Town, as there is insufficient money to buy the 2^nd Christmas Tree.

After buying the Christmas items, the participant must then sell all of the Christmas items he or she has bought in just one of the towns named in the question. Remember, the selling prices are revealed in the results post. These prices are determined using the information provided in Tables 2, 3, and 4.

Table 2: Minimum, maximum, and mode (Chuckles Town & Merryville)

Table 3: Minimum, maximum, and mode (Tower Town & Festiville)

Table 4: Minimum, maximum, and mode (Winter Hill)

Entry format

For this contest, I expect to see entries made in the following format:

Buying
Name of Place:
Goods purchased:
Number purchased:
Amount spent on goods:

Selling
Name of Place:

Donation
Account:
Percentage donated:

Example of entry

Buying
Name of Place: Chuckles Town
Goods purchased: Pies
Number purchased: 83
Amount spent on goods: 99.60 Hive

Selling
Name of Place: Tower Town

Donation
Account: @mybestfriendforever
Percentage donated: 30%

The closing date and time for this contest is 6PM coordinated universal time (UTC) 24/12/2020. Responses after this time will not be accepted. The answers will be provided in the results post along with the video containing the generation of selling prices using the model.

This contest leads us right up to Christmas. I hope everyone has fun playing the game. I also hope everyone takes the opportunity to think about who they would like to share their winnings with if they happen to win.

More information

If you want to know more about the ‘Buying and Selling’ Game (usual version), I suggest that you watch the following video:

If you have any questions, feel free to ask in the comments section.

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 New 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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