Estimating the value of goods is one of humanity's oldest skills. As early as 3000 BC, Sumerian cuneiform tablets recorded the prices of barley, copper, and livestock, allowing merchants to gauge the relative value of goods. In the souks of the medieval Arab world, haggling — "musāwama" in Arabic — was a codified art where buyer and seller had to estimate the "fair price" through successive approximations. Saint Thomas Aquinas theorized this concept of "justum pretium" in his Summa Theologica (1265–1274), asserting that a fair price existed objectively for every good — an idea that dominated European economic thought for five centuries.
The price guessing game entered popular culture on November 26, 1956, when Mark Goodson and Bill Todman launched The Price Is Right on NBC, hosted by Bill Cullen. The original show, where contestants bid on objects without exceeding the real price, aired until 1965. Its revival on September 4, 1972 on CBS, with Bob Barker as host, turned it into a cultural phenomenon. Barker hosted the show for 35 years (1972–2007), an absolute record in American television history. Drew Carey succeeded him, and the show now exceeds 9,000 episodes, making it the longest-running American game show still in production.
In France, Le Juste Prix was adapted by TF1 on September 19, 1988, hosted by Vincent Lagaf'. The concept was simple: guess the price of everyday objects with "higher!" or "lower!" clues. The show attracted up to 7 million viewers and became an afternoon ritual for French audiences during the 1990s. The expression "le juste prix" (the right price) entered everyday French language. The format has been adapted in over 40 countries: El Precio Justo in Spain, O Preço Certo in Portugal, Der Preis ist heiß in Germany, and Sahi Daam Batao in India.
The "higher/lower" mechanism relies on binary search, formalized by John Mauchly in 1946 for the ENIAC program. This algorithm, which halves the search space at each step, can find a number among 1,000 in only 10 attempts (log₂(1000) ≈ 10). With 6 attempts, you can theoretically cover a range of 64 values (2⁶). Tony Hoare, inventor of quicksort in 1960, described this approach as "the most natural algorithm the human mind can conceive" — confirmed by studies showing that 7-year-olds spontaneously use it in guessing games.
The work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, awarded the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics, revealed why we estimate prices so poorly. Their landmark 1974 paper in Science describes the anchoring bias: the first price seen influences all subsequent estimates. In their famous rigged wheel experiment, participants had to estimate the percentage of African countries in the UN after seeing a random number — those who saw 65 estimated an average of 45%, compared to 25% for those who saw 10. Richard Thaler (Nobel 2017) added the concept of "mental accounting": we don't process prices the same way depending on the category — a €10 difference on a book seems huge, but negligible on a television. fMRI studies by Brian Knutson at Stanford showed that seeing a high price activates the insula, the same brain region as physical pain.
In the digital age, price estimation games are experiencing a massive revival. The Higher Lower Game by Jack Sheridan (2016) surpassed 100 million games played by comparing Google search volumes. On TikTok, "guess the price" videos have accumulated billions of views, with creators like @overpriceaf attracting millions of followers. E-commerce platforms use "dynamic pricing" algorithms — Amazon adjusts its prices 2.5 million times per day according to MIT research. The global quiz and trivia game market, including estimation games, was worth 8.3 billion dollars in 2024, driven by the success of short-form mobile formats.