The idea of guessing the value of an object dates back to antiquity. The Greeks played "artia e peritta" (odds or evens), a game mentioned by Plato in Lysis around 380 BC, where one player hid pebbles and the other guessed their number. In the bazaars of Persia and the Levant, "dast-forushi" (hand selling) required the buyer to propose a price without seeing the item, then negotiate through successive iterations — a direct ancestor of the "higher or lower" mechanic. In Rome, public auctions organized by praecones (town criers) were already a collective exercise in price estimation, described by Cicero in his Verrine Orations (70 BC).
Price estimation became a spectacle with the birth of television. On November 26, 1956, Mark Goodson and Bill Todman launched The Price Is Right on NBC in the United States, hosted by Bill Cullen. The concept was simple: contestants had to guess the price of everyday items without exceeding the actual price. The show won over the American public and aired continuously for eight years. In 1972, Bob Barker took over on CBS in a revamped version that would last 35 years (1972–2007), an absolute record for a game show host. Drew Carey succeeded him in 2007 and the show is still on the air, totaling over 9,000 episodes.
In France, the concept arrived on January 4, 1988 on TF1 under the name Le Juste Prix, hosted by Vincent Lagaf'. The show became a cultural phenomenon of the 1990s, attracting up to 7 million daily viewers. The cry "Le Juste Priiiiix!" entered French popular culture. In the UK, The Price Is Right aired from 1984 on ITV, hosted by Leslie Crowther then Bruce Forsyth. The format has been adapted in over 40 countries, from Australia to Brazil to India (Sahi Daam Batao).
The "higher or lower" principle relies on a fundamental mechanism in computer science: binary search, formalized by John Mauchly in 1946. This algorithm halves the search space at each step: with just 10 comparisons, you can identify one element among 1,024 possibilities. Charles Antony Richard Hoare drew inspiration from it to invent quicksort in 1960, a sorting algorithm based on successive comparisons. The human brain uses a similar but imperfect process: a study by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky published in 1974 in Science showed that our price estimates are systematically biased by the anchoring effect — the first price seen disproportionately influences the next estimate, even if it is random.
The psychology of price estimation has been widely studied in behavioral economics. Richard Thaler, winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Economics, described the "endowment effect" as early as 1980: we overvalue objects we own by approximately 2 to 3 times their market price. Baruch Fischhoff documented the overconfidence bias in the 1970s: after a streak of correct answers, players become too bold and make more mistakes. Sarah Lichtenstein and Paul Slovic showed in 1971 that preference between two options depends on the measurement method used (preference reversal), a phenomenon directly observable in price estimation games. More recently, Dan Ariely demonstrated in Predictably Irrational (2008) that "free" prices completely distort our mental calibration.
In the digital age, the "higher or lower" concept has experienced a spectacular revival. In 2016, Briton Nick Sheridan launched The Higher Lower Game website, which asks players to compare Google search volumes between two topics. The game went viral, reaching millions of players within months and spawning a mobile app. On Twitch and YouTube, streamers popularized variants comparing product prices, salaries, or sports statistics. The format has also taken over social media: "more expensive or cheaper?" quizzes on TikTok have accumulated billions of views. In 2024, the global online quiz game market was estimated at 8.3 billion dollars, with price guessing games among the most shared formats.