Multiple winners hardly remarkable

Re: What was chance of multiple wins? (SP, June 7) The Starphoenix quotes University of Regina Professor Volodin as saying that the probability of Prairie Sky Cannabis winning a retail licence in four different locations is one in 1,319,760. However, the blackboard behind Prof. Volodin’s picture says that this is the probability of it winning in Battleford, Estevan, Martensville and Moosomin.

The interpretation of this calculation would be correct if Prairie Sky Cannabis had only applied in these four jurisdictions and had won them all. To consider the chance of winning four (or more) locations, you would have to consider the 24 others which Prairie Sky could have but did not win. The calculation is complicated because the chance at each location varies, depending on the number of applicants. However, supposing that all 28 jurisdictions had 51 applicants, the probability that Prairie Sky won four or more is about one in 5,000. Still small, but not as astounding.

But why focus on one applicant? To see if something remarkable happened, one needs to look at the pattern of wins among all applicants. Again, the computation requires knowing which applicants applied where, but assuming that all 51 applicants applied to all 32 jurisdictions, one can show that one would expect about four applicants would win more than once, and the fact that just one applicant actually won four times is not at all remarkable.

Mik Bickis, Saskatoon