Who’s most likely to win The Price Is Right Showcase Showdown?

A friend pointed out a paper written almost just for me. It’s about the game show The Price Is Right. Rafael Tenorio and Timothy N Cason’s To Spin Or Not To Spin? Natural and Laboratory Experiments from The Price Is Right, linked to from here, explores one of the show’s distinctive pieces, the Showcase Showdown. This is the part, done twice each show, where three contestants spin the Big Wheel. They get one or two spins to get a total of as close to a dollar as they can without going over.

One natural question is: does the order matter? Are you better off going first, second, or third? Contestants don’t get to choose order; they’re ranked by how much they’ve won on the show already. (I believe this includes the value of their One-Bids, the item-up-for-bid that gets them on stage. This lets them rank contestants when all three lost their pricing games.) The first contestant always has a choice of whether to spin once or twice. The second and third contestants don’t necessarily get to choose what to do. Is that an advantage or a disadvantage?

In this paper, published 2002, Tenorio and Cason look at the game-theoretical logic. And compare it to how people actually play the game, on the show and in laboratory experiments. (The advantage of laboratory experiments, besides that you can get more than two each day, is that participants’ behavior won’t be thrown off by the thoughts of winning a thousand or more dollars for a good spin.) They also look some at how the psychology of risk affects people’s play.

(I’m compelled — literally, I can’t help myself — to note they make some terminology errors. They mis-label the Showcase Showdown as the bit at the end of the show, where two contestants put up bids for showcases. It’s a common mistake, and probably reflects that “showdown” has connotations of being one-on-one. But that segment is simply the Showcase Round. The Showcase Showdown is the spinning-the-big-wheel part.)

Their research, anyway, suggests that if every contestant played perfectly — achieving a “Nash equilibrium”, in which nobody can pick a better strategy given the choices other players make — going later does, indeed, give a slight advantage. The first contestant would win about 31% of the time, the second about 33%, and the third about 36% of the time. In watching the show to see what happens they found the first contestant won about 30% of the time, the second about 34%, and the third about 36% of the time. That’s no big difference.

The article includes more fascinating statistical breakdowns, answering questions such as “are spins on the wheel uniformly distributed?” That is, are you as likely to spin $1.00 on the first spin as you are to spin 0.05? Or 0.50? They have records of what people actually do. Or what prize payouts would be expected, from theoretical perfect play, and how they compare to actual play.

The paper is written for an academic audience, particularly one versed in game theory. If you are somehow not, it can be tough going. It’s all right to let your eye zip past a paragraph of jargon, or of calculations, to get back to the parts that read as English. Real mathematicians do that too, as a way of understanding the point. They can come back around later to learn how the authors got to the point.

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