Last week, SPG announced their ‘Open the World’ promotion, which offers a grand prize of a week-long vacation at one of their exclusive resorts, as well as free night certificates, Amazon and Amex gift cards, and SPG points. You can play twice a day by entering your SPG number and email address here.
Like all of my friends, I’ve been dutifully playing twice a day, although my efforts thus far have been to no avail. Which begs the question, is this really worth my time?
As is a theme across many of my posts, I’m going to resort to some math to tell me the answer.
Let’s assume you have a 1/100 chance of winning on any given play with an average prize value of $20. The two estimates are fairly reasonable (though perhaps generous; I’ll get to that in a minute) given that I have heard of two winners among a group of about 30, and that the prizes range from 1000 SPG points to a $25 Amazon gift card. Note that I’m going to ignore the free nights and grand prizes because their probabilities are small enough that they balance out the extra value.
This morning, I timed how long it took me to play twice — 30 seconds. Given that the promotion runs through the end of September, that’s a total of 15 minutes over the course of the month (30 days * 1/2 minute per day).
With 60 plays and a probability of winning of 1/100, my expected chance of winning is 60%. Since we assumed that the average prize is worth $20, my expected value (read about that here and in a future post) is 60% * $20 = $12.
I gave up 15 minutes of my time to earn (on average) $12, which would come out to $48/hour for my time.
Whether or not that’s worth it to you is a question of how you value your free time, as well as whether or not you agree with my estimations of odds and the average value of a prize. If you think my estimation was high and that the actual probability of winning is 1/200, my expected value goes down by half to $6 in 15 minutes for a rate of $24/hour for my time. Not worth it, if you ask me.
…now back to my cannoli.
OMG I WON!!!! Only $10. Haha.
[…] HT: demflyers […]
[…] and the odds of me making 2X or 3X on them is about the same odds of me winning a prize in that stupid SPG contest. People have been asking me what I plan on doing with the…well, stay tuned for […]
[…] does that leave us? Well, as I explained in a post a couple of months back as to whether or not the SPG Open the World promo was worth your time, you need to calculate the expected value of your entries to determine whether or not they are […]