Have you seen this show? I never watched it, but it is on before NBC's new show "Heroes," which I like. It's a pretty simple take on expected return - multiplying the probability of a variety of outcomes by the payoff of each outcome. In this case, there's a fixed distribution of numbers, each with an identical probability. There's flashy lights and absurd drama to stretch it out, but it would be boring TV if not for that.
What I find interesting is that they have a commercial for a "play at home" game, with six cases. If you call or text message in, you get to pick a case. There is a random drawing of people who choose the correct case for $10,000 every night. What you would expect in a random world is that each number gets a roughly equal number of votes. But that's not the case. Tonight, two seperate numbers each had almost 40% of the votes.
I can't help but wonder why, and I have no answers.
Monday, October 09, 2006
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3 comments:
Could it have something to do with how they're numbered? Or the arrangement of the cases? I can see people not wanting to pick the first or last in a series.
I did mean to say that they had almost 40% of the votes each. The cases in question were 4 and 5.
I think it would be interesting to see what people's underlying thoughts are. Possible reasons occur to me:
People are choosing the model holding the case.
People don't want to choose an "extreme" like 1 or 6, and tend to stay toward the middle.
Not enough people are voting to make the sample behave likea large sample should.
People are exhibiting a form of spatial bias, based on where the cas appears. Last night, instead of two rows of three cases, 1 and 2 were at the to left, 3 and 4 were in the middle row with 3 beneath 2, 5 and 6 were in the bottom row, with 5 beneath 4, like a staircase.
I hadn't paid attention before last night, but I know the % of guesses are never evenly distributed, in the 3 or 4 weeks I have seen the show. I think it could be an interesting study.
Alicia and I only have NBC right now (literally...it's our only station--we have no cable). So we've caught a few Deal or No Deals. And the pattern continues.
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