Buz writes:

> Wirt, one thing that you have not taken into account is
>  the max of $75000 over 80 employees (a constraint from
>  an earlier posting).  Your equation would work from the
>  data given in this post, but since there are 80 employees
>  and a maximum of $75000, if all of the employees missed
>  0 hours, it would cost the company $120,000.  So, the
>  amount in total needs to be factored into the calculations.

You probably haven't yet seen my second posting which said that the
exponential form of the equation would be necessary to "bow" the line to
accomodate the distribution so that it precisely totals $75K.

Note that for the exponential equation I gave earlier, the exponential
version = the straightline equation if the exponent equals 1. It's just that
it would be beyond hope that the total bonus paid out would equal $75K under
a straightline bonus, given Efren's distribution. Because the distribution is
not likely to equal $75K, the equation line will have to be bowed one way or
the other.

Iterative approximation is the easiest (only practical) way to calculate the
exponent necessary to bow the line, but that's not difficult to program up.

Wirt Atmar