Darden’s Luckiest Student discovered that nothing lasts forever as his final bid for a cash prize yielded only applause for his sportsmanship.
Hideki Inoue (Class of ’08) survived more than a week of random eliminations to be named Darden’s Luckiest Student, which gave him a shot at a $17,500 scholarship – a random act of kindness from an anonymous benefactor of the Darden School.
Ah, but cruel fate befell Inoue as he rejected a guaranteed cash offer of $5,679 to take a chance on a $17,500 windfall. Dressed in the ancestral Samurai garb of his native Japan, Inoue boldly asserted that he would instead choose between two identical briefcases. One contained the lucky prize, the other contained only air.
Inoue made his selection. The crowd grew silent. He released the spring clasps on the top of the case. And opened the lid to reveal…nothing. Just a briefcase full of blues. The other case, the one Inoue did not choose, was promptly opened. Inside, tantalizing, almost taunting, was a card emblazoned with the numerals: $17,500.
Such is the inscrutable nature of luck. Inoue bowed with good grace and was rewarded with polite applause from his fellow students.
Professor Sam Bodily, who served as emcee of the weeklong Luckiest Student event, observed that Inoue, at the end of the day, was no more or less lucky than any of his fellow students. With the prize still in hand, Bodily said the event would be held again next year to gauge the vagaries of luck and random events.
The Random Act of Kindness experience for Darden’s Luckiest Student is part of an ongoing research experiment being conducted by professors Bodily and Phil Pfeifer, who conceived the event. The Random Act of Kindness provides students an opportunity to ponder the role that randomness and the abstraction of luck plays in business life.
Students were chosen and gradually eliminated from the event in entirely random and varying fashion.
While students in Bodily’s class discuss the issue of uncertainty when studying cases about real companies, A Random Act of Kindness moves the analysis beyond the theoretical into the realm of actual consequences. Here, the stakes are real. Factors such as risk tolerance and the statistics of chance come into play as the student decides whether to go literally for the gold, or take a guaranteed amount from the banker.