There is a reason why I’m posing this question, but the situation is quite complicated, so I’ll leave my motivation for a later time. For now, here’s the scenario:
Each of 100 people is randomly assigned a number from 1 to 100, and this drawing process determines the order in which the people involved can choose their apartments (#1 picks first, then #2, and so on). The apartments range from being in excellent condition to being in extremely poor condition, so those with lower numbers will most likely get the best apartments. After all 100 people have been paired with a number, however, approximately 20 of these people are crossed off the list because they never even needed an apartment in the first place. Because these people do not need to choose an apartment, then, they are merely skipped in the apartment-selection process – a non-apartment-needing person with #5, for example, will be skipped over, and the person with #6 will actually be the fifth to choose an apartment (assuming that no other non-needers had lower numbers). Now, it seems rather absurd to me that people who never needed an apartment would be paired with numbers anyway; I would think that the non-apartment-needers should be excluded from the original random drawing (so that each of 80 people would be randomly assigned a number from 1-80 instead). My question is, though: even though it seems silly, is there really a methodological problem in the first scenario? Does a person’s chance of getting any one number increase if the non-needers are excluded from the original process, even though they are still skipped over in the first scenario? Does the violation of independence render the random assignment process fundamentally flawed?
Any explanations/conclusions would be MUCH appreciated. There is a method to my madness!
Cheers,
tartuffe.