If we’ve decided that at the significance level we find comfortable there are too few clean sweeps of any position in Contestants Row, the natural question is why there are so few. We estimated there should have been six clean sweeps, based on modelling clean-sweep occurrences as a binomial distribution. Something in the model went wrong. Let’s try to reason out what it was.
One assumption for a binomial distribution are that we have some trial, some event, which happens many times. Each episodes is the obvious trial here. The outcome we’re interested in seeing has some probability of happening on each trial; there is indeed some probability of a clean sweep each episode. The binomial distribution assumes that this probability is constant for every trial, that it doesn’t become more or less likely the tenth or hundredth or thousandth time around, and this seems likely to hold for The Price Is Right episodes. Granted there is some chance of a clean sweep in one episode; what could be done to increase or decrease the likelihood from episode to episode?
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