It's official: Nobody at the Darden School is as lucky as first-year student Jong Uck Park, who took home a $18,750 prize yesterday after winning the 2008 "Luckiest Student" contest.
The event, according to Darden professors Sam Bodily and Phil Pfeifer, which has been called a random act of kindness, was originally established with the help of an anonymous Darden graduate as a type of research experiment to see how people treat risk. Pfeifer added that the contest demonstrates to students how randomness and luck play a role in the business world, not to mention daily life.
According to Bodily, the program lets people examine risk aversion and tolerance for risk and shows how much people will wager.
"We look at a lot of case studies [when analyzing risk] with real companies," Bodily said. "But nothing is more real than zero or $18,750 of your own money."
After a number of elimination rounds, Park was left as the final competitor in the contest. He only had to select a briefcase.
In the last round, Park was first asked to choose one of two cases, one of which contained the prize money. He was then given a randomly generated cash offer of $3,000, as a third option similar to that offered on the TV show "Deal or No Deal." Park was asked to accept the guaranteed cash deal or take the briefcase gamble.
Needless to say, Park didn't take the deal. Pfeifer said the $3,000 offer -- though substantial -- was not large enough to prevent Park from taking the much more rewarding chance.
"There are two people who hold cases and all of them are our professors ... one of them I was with last semester, so I went to him," Park said. "That was [my] only strategy to pick up the briefcase."
According to Pfeifer, last year's finalist, second-year Darden student Hideki Inoue, was not nearly as lucky as Park.
After choosing to take the gamble, Inoue opened the empty briefcase, Pfeifer said.
As a result of last year's outcome, Pfeifer said the money used in the event rolled over to this year. After "scrounging up" a few more hundred dollars, so that the possible prize in 2008 equaled the cost of one semester's in-state tuition, he said, the contest was organized again.
This year, though, Park chose the right briefcase and "the crowd went crazy," Pfeifer said, noting that many members of the Darden community attended the event.
Pfeifer added that he thought Park was very gracious about winning. According to Pfeifer, Park spoke to him before taking the gamble and said he was prepared for either outcome.
"I didn't expect it all," Park said. "It's based on just luck, not any skill."
Although the original intent of the event was to offer the chance at a semester's tuition, Park said he wants to use the money "to give back to the community." He also said, though, he does not yet know how he will do this.
"I need to talk to my wife to decide first," Park said. "We agreed on using this money [for a] good purpose ... but we need to decide how."
In addition to introducing students to the theories of risk and randomness, the contest also had a third message worth noting, Bodily said.
"The nice message in this is that [the event] is the result of a graduate for whom life was favorable, and he chose to share those funds randomly," Bodily said. "It shows that some of the randomness in life is a gift, and that it's not all terrible"
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