Financialisation and the coupon pool

The financialisation of global health

Global health is increasingly reliant on financial markets. The ongoing financialisation of global health raises new questions of governance, which we expect to affect policy makers as much as doctors, nurses and patients in the years to come. In this editorial, we will first explain what is meant by financialisation, then illustrate its nature in the field of global health via three examples, ...

The Coupon Report

The Hypergeometric Coupon Collection Problem and its Dual

Suppose an urn contains M balls, of different types, which are removed from the urn in a uniform random manner. In the hypergeometric coupon collection problem, we are interested in the set of balls that have been removed at the moment when at least one ball of each type has been removed. In its dual, we are interested in the set of removed balls at the first moment that this set contains all o...

The Coupon Collector’s Problem

In this note we will consider the following problem: how many coupons we have to purchase (on average) to complete a collection. This problem, which takes everybody back to his childhood when this was really “a problem”, has been considered by the probabilists since the eighteenth century and nowadays it is still possible to derive some new results, probably original or at least never published...

Coupon Collecting

We consider the classical coupon collector’s problem in which each new coupon collected is type i with probability pi; P i1⁄41 n pi1⁄41. We derive some formulas concerning N, the number of coupons needed to have a complete set of at least one of each type, that are computationally useful when n is not too large. We also present efficient simulation procedures for determining P(N . k), as well a...