In Colombia there is this great tradition of completing the official album of the FIFA world cup every 4 years. The album includes on sticker per player for each participant country as well as some complementary stickers for the stadiums an some very shiny ones for the cup and the official logo. A total of 642 stickers that can be bought in envelopes of 7 at $1 the envelope. With a cost of $2 for the album filling the album by buying the stickers at cost will be around $93. But of course that will never happen since each envelope has a random sample of the total ensemble of stickers.
My question is then, if there is no exchange of stickers, how much would it cost in average to complete the album?
Lets assume the stickers are evenly manufactured (which has been claimed by the manufactured but who knows). Also let's assume we could buy sequentially as many packs as we want.
If there is no exchange of stickers the task gets very difficult with a mean value of 3900 stickers to fill the album, about $550.
