It's a Beautiful Sunny Day After a Week of Rainy

question 33

Essay

It's a beautiful sunny day after a week of rainy weather and both of the local car washes are busy. One car wash is fully automated, touchless, and can wash a vehicle of any size to a dazzling luster in 5 minutes flat. The other car wash is a fund raiser staffed by eager amateurs that work on one car at a time and can finish it in about 4 minutes (their time is governed by the Poisson distribution). Customer arrivals at both car washes are Poisson distributed with a mean of 10 per hour. How long does it take the average customer to work his way through either system? How many customers are in the systems on average?

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Definitions:

Indifference Schedule

A table or graph that shows a combination of two goods that give a consumer equal satisfaction and utility, illustrating consumer preferences.

Units of X

A term often used in economics to denote a quantity of a particular good or service being considered.

Data

Information, especially facts or numbers, collected to be examined and considered and used to help decision-making.

Value for Y

This term does not directly correspond to a widely recognized economic concept without additional context. It may be used in specific mathematical or economic models to denote the value of a variable Y.