A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

THERE GOES FRITZ!  Slate's Ben Blatt uses game theory, and a whole lot of review of pricing game results, to develop strategies for dominance on The Price Is Right without knowing a single price, yielding a detailed two-page cheat sheet. For instance, when you're on Contestants' Row:

Game theory says that when you are last to bid, you should bid one dollar more than the highest bidder. You obviously won’t win every time, but in the last 1,500 Contestants' Rows to have aired, had final bidders committed to this strategy, they would have won 54 percent of the time. Instead, last bidders too often rely on their intuition, or on suggestions called out by delirious audience members. As a result, they have won only 35 percent of the time. Contestants in this sample of 1,500 who guessed a value between the highest and second-highest current guesses... win only 20 percent of the time.