Price is Right

User offline. Last seen 9 years 19 weeks ago.
FUR3jr
Number 468
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Conspirator for: 15 years 27 weeks
Posted on: April 16, 2012 - 10:49am

I've been thinking about the Price Is Right.  The show has been on in it's current form since 1972.  This show is, I believe, a goldmine of economic data.

I would like to analyse the data from the show to see as the money supply has expanded, whether or not contestants bids have become more inacurate.  If what I've read about economics is true, the more inflation of the money supply exists, the more difficult it is to determine the value of things in the market place.

I wonder if the data from the show is examined, whether or not you could see a trend of the bidding becoming more innaccurate over time.


User offline. Last seen 6 years 29 weeks ago.
static_free
Number 821
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Conspirator for: 12 years 7 weeks
Posted on: April 16, 2012 - 6:00pm #1

As hokey as the show is, I spent a good part of the 80's watching and "playing at home". I'm with you, the products featured on The Price is Right were real items with real $ prices assigned to them.  Over 7500 episodes have aired since the late sixties...so who has an un-paid intern for the summer with nothing better to do than build a gigantic spreadsheet?  Once it's in a spreadsheet, I volunteer to crunch the data, but collecting it would most likely end up with me being committed to a nice white room with 4 soft walls to keep me company.

__________________

static free


User offline. Last seen 9 years 19 weeks ago.
FUR3jr
Number 468
FUR3jr's picture
Conspirator for: 15 years 27 weeks
Posted on: April 17, 2012 - 5:30pm #2

All we need is a volunteer for each season.  This may be something that I contact the Reason Foundation for, as they already have an in on the show with the current host doing reason.tv things.  But I also think that this is something that the liberty conspiracy could publish as a study.  I'll think further on this.  Perhaps we could start a crowdsource funding page and actually get paid to watch TPIR, then publish our finding somewhere.

I'm kind of excited about the prospect of actually doing this.  I sort of get off on things like this, which is why I have been such a big fan of sports in general.  Watching the same scenarios over and over again, you see trends emerge, patterns, curves.  It's a thing of beauty.  This may be a sort of stream of consciousness association, but the prospect of doing this sort of project reminds me of an interesting album of music that was put out as an album in the late 1990's or early 2000's by a DJ who was a fan of the Greatful Dead.  He had listened to many many bootlegs of performances by the band, and noticed patterns in their performances.  He then overlaid tracks from various performances and compiled them into a double CD length album called Grayfolded.  It is sometimes bizarre, sometimes ethereal, and often... spacey.


User offline. Last seen 6 years 29 weeks ago.
static_free
Number 821
static_free's picture
Conspirator for: 12 years 7 weeks
Posted on: April 17, 2012 - 8:56pm #3

A big part of my day job is data trending, all we need to start finding the patterns is data that lists several products that make a repeat appearance on the show and the corresponding prices associated with them. Ideally, you would harvest data from the same or similar products featured on shows going back as far as possible. 

I have never checked this site out myself, but this place is claiming to have the mother-load of old episodes, and it looks like they are connected with Netflix: http://www.yidio.com/show/the-price-is-right

 


User offline. Last seen 11 years 9 weeks ago.
Rattan11
Number 890
Conspirator for: 11 years 9 weeks
Posted on: February 18, 2013 - 4:15am #4

Great post with very informative information..