Deal Or No Deal

[Maitre]

It doesn't seem to be 100% consistent. The offer always has a negative expected value (obviously), but there definitely isn't a simple relationship between amount in play and amount offered. It would actually be kind of interesting to watch a bunch of shows, record amount in play vs. amount offered and graph it in Excel.

I tried to creat a spreadsheet versino of the game that used a prize-preference function to determine the amount offered. The theory of my version was that each prize amount left in play had associated with it a certain preference score, so that multiplying each available amount by the preference score and summing the resulting values, and dividing my the sum of the preference scores, would give you the amount offered. My first attempt simply took the probability of each of the remaining amounts and multiplied that by the raw amount numbers, but that version resulted in offers that were too high, or was it too low? One or the other. The preference score method seemed to track better, but I was still off from the show offers. I'm pretty convinced that the show uses some non-parametric distribution estimated by the amounts left in play and then the offer is picked somewhere near the median value of that distribution.