The Greatest Show on Earth, Part II
Previously, I wrote a post on NBC’s show, Deal or No Deal. If you haven’t seen it, you’ll love it – check the old post for the details. The season premier is tonight, 7 pm CT on NBC. I believe there is a $5 or $6 million dollar top prize tonight.
Beside finding it absolutely hilarious (I still think it belongs on Fox), I wrote about it because I thought folks might find it interesting or suprising that some economists pay attention to this show and games shows in general as a way of learning about people’s attitudes toward risk. Unlike the experiments economic researchers can afford to set up in the lab, the show provides big time real money choices for people to make – choices that involve substantial risk.
Given that we know the probabilities associated with the outcomes, and the choices the players make (the often repeated “deal or no deal”), we can learn much about risk tolerances and preferences of people.
However, in my perusing of the Deal or No Deal website, I found a link (a dead link actually) for “casting calls” for future Deal or No Deal shows. While I realize that they have to get people to come on the show (how hard would it be?), it was the particular term “casting calls” that made me pause.
Do you think this is problematic for any conclusions reached from such research? Say the research makes a claim about people’s risk attitudes in general – would you believe it?
–CT
October 16th, 2006 at 9:16 am
I love deal or no deal! Its a rather addicting show that we watch at my house regularly. I was kind of disturbed on the process you must go through to be a contestant on the show. I would definately be unsure of participating after reviewing the casting information on the website. To me it seems kind of creepy that they mention you must submit a video of yourself and supporters, plus head and body shots of each person wanting to attend. To me this extensive application process would turn a lot of people away. I think it would be hard to make a claim about people’s risk attitude, you never know when greed will set in. I mean I say I would take a deal if I were to get up to $100,000, but then again if I were there and feeling lucky, I might keep going and let the greed take over.