The Flat Tyre

I am retelling a story (with slight modifications) that was told to us by Professor Malay Bhattacharya in our Statistics Class.

Four MBA students, who were batchmates & close friends, were studying in a highly ranked B-. The term exam was fast approaching and the friends were nervously preparing for the most difficult subject of the term: Microeconomics.

The exam was scheduled for a Monday early morning session and the studious friends slogged night and day preparing for the test. They studied Demand Supply Functions, Consumer Theory, Theory of a Firm, Game theory and several other topics and mastered every one of them. They were bright students after all, but a little too playful.

Too playful, that they decided they will go for a binge on the weekend preceding the exam to a city that was about 60 miles away.

They drove to the City on the Sunday evening and partied hard through the night. So much so that they forgot they had a test on Monday morning and showed up late in their hostel, late for the exam.

They went to the Economics Professor excusing themselves for not showing up for the exam due to a flat tyre on their way back. The professor - a perfect gentleman he was - said "Alright young men! I understand your situation and I want to give you a fair chance. So I will give you folks a re-test this afternoon. But I dont have a lot of time to prepare another set of questions, so I will limit myself to two. Just two questions and no more. But in order to compensate for that, I want to put you each in a separate room, alone by yourself to write the exam!"

The students, counting their goodluck, thanked the Professor for not only allowing them to take a retest, but also generously allowing to limit the questions in the exam. The professor mysteriously smiled in response and said"But dont expect it to be an easy nut to crack".

In the afternoon, the Professor sent them to separate rooms where ther were alone. The clock ticked 1:00 and the question papers were distributed to the students in different rooms. As promised there were two questions.

The first one was for 5 marks: "Describe Prisoner's Dilemma"

The second one was for 95 marks: "Which trye went bust?"

And the students got only 5 marks in the test. If you dont know why, see what is Prisoner's Dilemma here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner's_dilemma