The Price Is Right...or is it? Demographic and category effects on consumer price knowledge

Abstract

For over a quarter of a century, the television game show The Price Is Right has been testing American consumers’ knowledge of prices for a wide array of products. The settings of this highly popular game show allow for a broad examination of the extent of price knowledge consumers possess across product categories. Much of our current perspective on consumer price knowledge has been limited by a restricted choice of product categories studied, and a lack of significant respondent incentives for providing accurate price responses. Using data from hundreds of contestants, highly motivated to provide accurate price estimates, this paper studies the impact of product‐ and consumer‐related factors on consumer price knowledge across 29 product categories.