Reserving a seat on an airplane isn’t exactly a sure thing. Airlines routinely sell more tickets for a flight than there are available seats, a process called overbooking. If too many people show up at the gate, then some passengers will have to get bumped to a different flight. It can be extremely frustrating. So, why would airlines put their customers through such pain?
In this lesson, students use probability and expected value to investigate the overbooking phenomenon and why airlines make the decisions they do.