The Price is Right _and_ Publishable

A couple days ago I wondered if the game show The Price is Right would make a good natural economic experiment on auctions. Apparently it was worth at least a couple papers. There was a paper in the September 1996 issue of the American Economic Review finds that participants' bidding strategies are "transparently suboptimal" but they learn over the course of multiple attempts. I wonder if they mean bidding 1 dollar less than the person before you is what they consider "transparently suboptimal" or if they're seeing something more subtle?

Then there's a follow up paper from the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization's June 2004 issue. They start with the 1996 paper's conclusion of sub optimal bidding and try to determine why the players are behaving so. There's a .pdf of the second paper here, it's going on my reading list but I need to pick up the Kagel paper first.

Google scholar finds quite a few other papers that mention The Price is Right without dealing with the auction aspect. One looks at the strategy for spinning the wheel to get a score of $1, and another uses it to investigate price awareness of consumers, for example.