Okay, I’m watching “The Price is Right,” and I can’t believe how poorly the contestants play. The strategy is quite simple. It’s not the Monty Hall problem. Your goal is to bid as close to the price of the product as possible without going over. That means that when you are the fourth contestant to bid, there are only four possible bids. All other bids are STUPID!
Let’s pretend that the first three contestants bid 500, 700, and 1000 dollars. The only four bids you should consider are 1, 501, 701, and 1001. To bid anything else excludes certain prices, without adding any more. For example, should you foolishly bid 800, any price in the 701-799 range goes to the guy who bid 700, when it could have been yours had you just topped him by 1 dollar. Yet hardly anybody does this!
Not vitriolic enough for a rant, which is why I’m sticking it here as a mere observation.
Well, that’s not entirely true. While I agree that that’s what they should do, bidding $800 DOES have a plus side if the item costs EXACTLY $800. A perfect bid is rewarded with a cash bonus of $100.
My favorite thing to see on that show is the first guy waaaaay overbidding, the second guy bidding $1, the third guy betting $2, and the forth guy betting $3. Napoleon these people ain’t.
Yeah, the cash bonus for hitting the nail on the head is supposed to be incentive for them to not use that predictable strategy. I suppose a $100 is good motivation when you’re just bidding on something that costs $750, but the wise player would realize thats a poor gamble considering you get to move on to other games and perhaps win a car or two.
I always found it odd that you only got an extra $100 bones for hitting it right on the head, I mean iit happens pretty damn rarely and the odds are low so the bonus should be bigger. Its not as if budget is really a concern for them. I suppose if everyone on the show were smart enough to play it like this, you’d see that bonus increase to prevent this purely logical bidding which gives the 4th player a huge advantage.
Yeah, it’s frustrating to watch sometimes. But then again, the people who play that way seldom make it very far in the rest of the game, so there’s that for comfort. I just read the Onion’s interview with Bob Barker, and he chalks it up to people being too excited to think clearly. It’s very noisy, they’re on TV and in front of a bunch of other people, and they get flustered. It’s understandable.
Actually, some guy today nailed the price exactly and he won $500. They must have upped the award. I agree that $100 was way too low for such a difficult feat.
But the possibility of winning much more in the next contests still makes this a bad strategy. I realize the pressure that people have on TV, in front of millions of people, with all the studio lights. That’s why I didn’t make it a full-fledged rant.
The P.I.R. pre screens their contestants to be photogenic - leaving out most smart people.
Also there is a reason not to vote $1 more. You can bet lets say 10-$20 more and not let on to the other contestants that the $1 more bid is the way to go.
Additionally people actually memorize the price of some items so they can get in exactly.
And for those of you who are even more curious, you should always spin the wheel for the showcase showdown if you have 65 cents or less (unless, of course, someone has gone before you and you have to beat them). I worked for a professor a few summers ago who specialized in game theory, and was published for his Price of Right strategy. Turns out 65 cents is the magic number, if you consider the possibility of hitting the $5,000 or $1,000.
And for even more info, the summer I worked for him, all I did was watch episodes of The Family Feud and record information. Turns out that Richard Dawson would kiss any woman regardless of age, unless of course that woman was African-American. Interesting, eh?
They DO work the audience up into a screaming frenzy just prior to turning on the cameras. They’re usually pretty excited anyway, so it doesn’t take much to set them off. I’ve been there, a bunch of times, I used to live in LA and had a friend whose dream in life was to be on the show. He finally did get on and ended up winning a carpet and a china cabinet. Yay! No more TPIR tapings! (It does get tiresome after a while – say, twelve or fifteen shows…)
Even a genius wouldn’t be in a state where they could think at that point. I’m way better at those games sitting at home than I would be in RL. I was actually scared to yell at them on stage in case they took my advice…and I was wrong! (I went into total brain spasm when my friend got called. I couldn’t have helped him to save our lives. I’d probably have screwed him up anyway.)
It was seriously fun the first two or three times and it actually is rather fascinating; virtually everything is run in real time, or else it’s edited so well that it seems to when they air it. I saw them take twenty minutes to get through some new game where the equipment kept malfunctioning, and when it aired you couldn’t have told that anything went wrong. (They also dropped that game after using it one or two more times. Guess it had really bad technical problems.)
Are you sure? I read this article for an advertising and propaganda class last year (can’t remember the title, or the book it’s from, sorry–I did an amazon.com search, but couldn’t find it) that said Family Feud actually got a lot of hate mail because he would kiss any woman, regardless of age and race.
You know–I don’t think I sold the book back at the end of the semester. I’ll go unpack later and let you know.
Allright–not that anyone cares anymore, but I found the essay I mentioned in the last post while finally unpacking. The essay is called “Family Feud” in a book called * Boxed In: The Culture of TV by Mark Crispin Miller. Here’s a link to the book since my computer won’t let me get to the page with the vB coding on it.
The exact quote, from Dawson, is he meticulously kisses every female, “irrespective of age, color, or religion.” This practice has inspired “a lot of hate mail.”
Interesting. But he’s lying! I definitely remember a number of episodes where he wouldn’t kiss African American women. He may have done so later in his career from the point in which I saw the episodes (they were taped off of the Game Show Network). Of course, I would never trust an interview with a Hollywood-type over a personal biography (especially anyone who appeared on The Match Game).
The essay is hardly a personal biography. It’s actually wuite critical and the show in general, and especially Dawson. I think if Miller wanted to call him out for hypocrisy like that, he would have.
