LE3 .A278 2010

2010

Ranjan, Pritam

Acadia University

Bachelor of Science

Honours

Mathematics and Statistics

Mathematics & Statistics

Deal or No Deal is a television game show that involves one contestant, one banker and 26 briefcases containing different dollar values ranging between one cent and one million dollars. The allocation of dollar amounts inside the briefcases is unknown prior to the game to both the contestant and the banker. The contestant selects one case to start the game that remains closed until the end. The game is played to a maximum of nine rounds, with a certain number of briefcases opened each round, revealing the dollar amounts. After every round the banker will submit a dollar offer to the contestant in an attempt to buy the contestant’s briefcase. The question of interest is how exactly the banker determines the offer that will be given to the contestant. This thesis will focus on the formulation of the banker’s offers for each of the nine rounds in Deal or No Deal. The data set collected by playing the online National Broadcasting Corporation ( NBC) version and by watching the television ( NBC) ver-sion of the game are both analyzed to develop and compare several candidate models for the banker’s offers. These models will then be tested on new data points to de-termine how well the banker’s offer can be predicted for the online and television versions of Deal or No Deal.

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https://scholar.acadiau.ca/islandora/object/theses:663