The Price Is Right
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Was browsing the intraweb the other day when I came across this little nugget. It's a paper penned by Amy Biesterfeld from the University of Colorado at Boulder that was published in 2001 in the Journal of Statistics Education (Volume 9, Number 3). It looks at three pricing games; Master Key, Range Game and Plinko in a statistical analysis (and explains how to utilize the game show to instruct statistics classes). Master Key "illustrates basic rules of probability, including the law of total probability and Bayes' rule," while Range Game "illustrates continuous distributions, including the uniform distribution," and Plinko "illustrates the binomial distribution, expectations of linear combinations of random variables, and conditional expectations." It's quite a fascinating read, and I encourage everyone to have a look. Abstract is below, while full text can be found here.

The Price is Right is a popular U.S. television game show in which contestants play product-pricing games in order to win prizes. Games involve some knowledge of prices, but many involve the element of chance as well. This paper describes a classroom activity I have designed to help teach probability concepts to students in an upper-level course. It is based on the television game show The Price is Right. This exercise is designed to help students better understand basic concepts such as probability rules, common distributions, and expectations. The exercise is intended for an upper-level statistics course, but could easily be adapted for use in an introductory statistics course as well. This paper describes The Price is Right classroom activity in detail. Student evaluations of the activity are also included.

Journal of Statistics Education, v9n3, Biesterfeld, The Price (or Probability) Is Right

Labels: master key, odds, plinko, range game, statistics

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