psychological pricing

11 results back to index


pages: 519 words: 104,396

Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (And How to Take Advantage of It) by William Poundstone

availability heuristic, behavioural economics, book value, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, equal pay for equal work, experimental economics, experimental subject, feminist movement, game design, German hyperinflation, Henri Poincaré, high net worth, index card, invisible hand, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, laissez-faire capitalism, Landlord’s Game, Linda problem, loss aversion, market bubble, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Nash equilibrium, new economy, no-fly zone, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, Potemkin village, power law, price anchoring, price discrimination, psychological pricing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, random walk, RFID, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, rolodex, social intelligence, starchitect, Steve Jobs, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-martini lunch, ultimatum game, working poor

—shows how many degrees of freedom such a complex pricing challenge can present. With complex billing plans, it is difficult to comparison shop (every plan is different) and nearly impossible to predict what a plan will cost. Choosing a phone plan becomes a judgment under uncertainty, mediated by loss aversion and heuristics. One of the most powerful tools of psychological pricing is the flat-rate bias. Consumers like flat rates, even when they cost more. A 2009 study by the Utility Consumers’ Action Network claimed that cell phone users in the San Diego area paid an average of $3.02 a minute for calls. That’s the price when you divide the aggregate amount paid by the number of minutes used.

In 2008 Taco Bell president Greg Creed wrote an open letter to rapper 50 Cent, asking him to change his name to “79 Cent,” “89 Cent,” or “99 Cent” to promote the chain’s low prices. The rapper responded with a lawsuit for the uncharming figure of $4 million—resulting in ample free publicity for both parties. A Macy’s ad from the November 2, 1890, New York Times. About 60 percent of the prices end in 9. Charm prices inaugurated the study of psychological pricing. In 1936 Columbia University’s Eli Ginzberg published a one-page note on what he called “customary prices.” “For many years, retail prices in this country have been quoted at one or two cents below the decimal unit—$.49, $.79, $.98, $1.49, $1.98, tell the tale.” Ginzberg reported on the informal experiment of an unnamed large retailer.

With money on the line, “the experimental zeal, even of a daring business man, was . . . held in check.” For nearly half a century, much informed opinion held that charm prices were a harmless superstition. This didn’t keep retailers from using them. By the 1980s, the Kahneman-Tversky revolution had revived interest in psychological pricing. In eight studies published from 1987 to 2004, charm prices were reported to boost sales by an average of 24 percent relative to nearby prices. Don’t take that quotable figure too seriously. The increase in sales varied from insignificant to over 80 percent. Take an experiment done by Eric Anderson of the University of Chicago and Duncan Simester of MIT.


pages: 420 words: 98,309

Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts by Carol Tavris, Elliot Aronson

Ayatollah Khomeini, classic study, climate anxiety, cognitive dissonance, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, Donald Trump, false memory syndrome, fear of failure, Lao Tzu, longitudinal study, medical malpractice, medical residency, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, placebo effect, psychological pricing, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, social intelligence, sugar pill, telemarketer, the scientific method, trade route, transcontinental railway, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

If the woman who believes she is unlovable meets a terrific guy who starts pursuing her seriously, she will feel momentarily pleased, but that pleasure is likely to be tarnished by a rush of dissonance: "What does he see in me?" Her resolution is unlikely to be "How nice; I must be more appealing than I thought I was." More likely, it will be "As soon as he discovers the real me, he'll dump me." She will pay a high psychological price to have that consonance restored. Indeed, several experiments find that most people who have low self-esteem or a low estimate of their abilities do feel uncomfortable with their dissonant successes and dismiss them as accidents or anomalies.23 This is why they seem so stubborn to friends and family members who try to cheer them up.

Oz didn't reckon with the power of self-justification: We are good people. Therefore, if we deliberately inflict pain on another, the other must have deserved it. Therefore, we are not doing evil, quite the contrary. We are doing good. The relatively small percentage of people who cannot or will not reduce dissonance this way pay a large psychological price in guilt, anguish, anxiety, nightmares, and sleepless nights. The pain of living with horrors they have committed, but cannot morally accept, would be searing, which is why most people will reach for any justification available to assuage the dissonance. In the previous chapter, we saw on a smaller scale why many divorcing couples justify the hurt they inflict on each other.


pages: 113 words: 36,785

Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood by Michael Lewis

airport security, Berlin Wall, Fall of the Berlin Wall, psychological pricing, the new new thing

For the tedious and messy bits of my childhood my father was, like most fathers of his generation, absent. (News of my birth he received by telegram.) In theory, his tendency to appear only when we didn’t really need him should have left a lingering emotional distance; he should have paid some terrible psychological price for his refusal to suffer. But the stone cold fact is his children still love him, just as much as they love their mother. They don’t hold it against him that he never addressed their diaper rash, or fixed their lunches, or rehearsed the lyrics to “I’m a Jolly Old Snowman.” They don’t even remember!


pages: 464 words: 117,495

The New Trading for a Living: Psychology, Discipline, Trading Tools and Systems, Risk Control, Trade Management by Alexander Elder

additive manufacturing, Atul Gawande, backtesting, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, buy and hold, buy low sell high, Checklist Manifesto, computerized trading, deliberate practice, diversification, Elliott wave, endowment effect, fear index, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, offshore financial centre, paper trading, Ponzi scheme, price stability, psychological pricing, quantitative easing, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, risk tolerance, short selling, South Sea Bubble, systematic trading, systems thinking, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, transfer pricing, traveling salesman, tulip mania, zero-sum game

When a stock closes higher, it shows that bulls won the day's battle; that day's volume is added to OBV. When a stock closes lower, it shows that bears won the day, and that day's volume is subtracted from OBV. If prices close unchanged, OBV stays unchanged. On-Balance Volume often rises or falls before prices, acting as a leading indicator. Crowd Psychology Prices represent the consensus of value, but volume represents the emotions of market participants. It reflects the intensity of traders' financial and emotional commitments, as well as pain among losers, which is what OBV helps to track. A new high of OBV shows that bulls are powerful, bears are hurting, and prices are likely to rise.

See also Downtrends; Uptrends advisors' following of and conflicting timeframes of markets created by crowds deciding to trade or wait defined effect of support or resistance on and factor of five in futures markets at hard right edge health of identifying on long-term charts moving averages indicating NH-NL and objective signals for trades and oscillator levels psychology of emotions in and mass psychology price shocks rallies and declines and social psychology and Stochastic signals time spent in trading ranges vs. timing of trades and and volume of trading Trend-following indicators Directional system MACD Lines in Triple Screen trading system Trendlines: diagonal subjectivity of TRIN Triple bullish or bearish divergences Triple Screen trading system choosing timeframes in day-trading entry technique screen Force Index in market tide screen market wave screen objective of Stochastic signals in stops and profit targets in trend-following indicators and oscillators True breakouts True Range (TR) Tulip Mania 12-step programs Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions (AA) 20-day New High–New Low Index 2% Rule in futures markets as a guideline for pyramiding for institutional traders and Iron Triangle of risk control Two Roads Diverged: Trading Divergences (Alexander Elder) Tyson, Mike U Uncertainty Undecided traders Undercapitalization myth U.S. stock market: price cycles in trends in Unstuff Your Life (Andrew J.


pages: 241 words: 75,516

The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less by Barry Schwartz

accounting loophole / creative accounting, attribution theory, Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, Cass Sunstein, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, endowment effect, framing effect, hedonic treadmill, income per capita, job satisfaction, loss aversion, medical residency, mental accounting, Own Your Own Home, PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, Pareto efficiency, peak-end rule, positional goods, price anchoring, psychological pricing, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, science of happiness, search costs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith

However, those who had the option to change their minds were less satisfied with their choices than participants who did not have that option. And, perhaps most important, the participants had no idea that keeping the option open to change their minds would affect their satisfaction with the things they chose. So keeping options open seems to extract a psychological price. When we can change our minds, apparently we do less psychological work to justify the decision we’ve made, reinforcing the chosen alternative and disparaging the rejected ones. Perhaps we do less work putting opportunity costs of the rejected alternatives out of our minds. After all, if you put down a nonrefundable deposit for a house on Martha’s Vineyard, you focus on the beauty of the beach and the dunes.


pages: 297 words: 89,206

Social Class in the 21st Century by Mike Savage

Bullingdon Club, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clapham omnibus, Corn Laws, deindustrialization, deskilling, Downton Abbey, emotional labour, financial independence, gender pay gap, gentrification, Gini coefficient, income inequality, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, meritocracy, moral panic, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, old-boy network, precariat, psychological pricing, Sloane Ranger, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, very high income, winner-take-all economy, young professional

Many expressed a sense of being caught between two worlds, constantly juggling contradictory sources of identity. Thus, while the contemporary experience of upward mobility in Britain may involve indisputable gains in economic capital and social status, it is important to consider that such benefits can often come with a considerable psychological price tag. Michael Young’s satire on ‘the rise of the meritocracy’ focused mainly on the power of the school system to differentiate children on the basis of their IQs and said little about the significance of universities in affecting future careers. He wrote at a time when only 5 per cent of children went to universities.


pages: 346 words: 102,625

Early Retirement Extreme by Jacob Lund Fisker

8-hour work day, active transport: walking or cycling, barriers to entry, book value, buy and hold, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, delayed gratification, discounted cash flows, diversification, dogs of the Dow, don't be evil, dumpster diving, Easter island, fake it until you make it, financial engineering, financial independence, game design, index fund, invention of the steam engine, inventory management, junk bonds, lateral thinking, lifestyle creep, loose coupling, low interest rates, market bubble, McMansion, passive income, peak oil, place-making, planned obsolescence, Plato's cave, Ponzi scheme, power law, psychological pricing, retail therapy, risk free rate, sunk-cost fallacy, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, time value of money, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, wage slave, working poor

This person would pay a steep price32 by outsourcing this to professionals without at least understanding the basics of money management himself. In fact, outsourcing is a financial decision that should not be made blindly. Economic goals for someone aspiring to be a Renaissance man are to understand the difference between price and value. Value is psychological; price is determined by the market. learn to consider more than the immediate consequences of a choice. Also consider the future consequences--for example, opportunity cost and the time-value of money. Learn to see the unseen. learn to consider more than the consequences of a choice for just one group of people, but for all others as well.


pages: 338 words: 101,967

Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth by Noa Tishby

An Inconvenient Truth, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, Burning Man, centre right, COVID-19, disinformation, epigenetics, European colonialism, failed state, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, financial engineering, George Floyd, haute couture, if you build it, they will come, it's over 9,000, Jeremy Corbyn, lockdown, post-work, psychological pricing, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

One of the first questions people ask me about Israel is “Isn’t it dangerous?” And even though the country feels as safe as Venice Beach (if not more so), I get where the question is coming from. Israel has had its fair share of wars, and the international media eats them up. After all, “if it bleeds it leads.” But there is a long-lasting psychological price humans pay, hiding behind the headlines, and it plays out in every Israeli and Palestinian household. This chapter is also meant to illustrate how the “recent conflict” is not recent at all. It isn’t dependent on this government or another, with this policy or the other. The main thing to understand, both when talking about the wars and the regional psychology for peace attempts, is that Israel has always fought for her existence, but her enemies have changed throughout the years.


pages: 298 words: 43,745

Understanding Sponsored Search: Core Elements of Keyword Advertising by Jim Jansen

AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Black Swan, bounce rate, business intelligence, butterfly effect, call centre, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, content marketing, correlation does not imply causation, data science, en.wikipedia.org, first-price auction, folksonomy, Future Shock, information asymmetry, information retrieval, intangible asset, inventory management, life extension, linear programming, longitudinal study, machine translation, megacity, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, PageRank, place-making, power law, price mechanism, psychological pricing, random walk, Schrödinger's Cat, sealed-bid auction, search costs, search engine result page, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, sentiment analysis, social bookmarking, social web, software as a service, stochastic process, tacit knowledge, telemarketer, the market place, The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, yield management

So, a high-priced product is viewed superior in quality to a similar product priced for significantly less. Fractional pricing is the practice of costing products in odd prices or a little less than a higher round number (e.g., $9.99, $19.99, $7.97, etc.). Fractional pricing is based on the psychological pricing theory that consumers ignore the last digit and do not properly round up. Promotion.╇ Promotion includes all the channels and media used by a business to communicate to customers about its products or services. Promotion is how a business markets and sells products or services. Naturally, a business must balance communicating effectively while also being cost efficient.


Sam Friedman and Daniel Laurison by The Class Ceiling Why it Pays to be Privileged (2019, Policy Press)

affirmative action, Ascot racecourse, Boris Johnson, Bullingdon Club, classic study, critical race theory, discrete time, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, gender pay gap, gig economy, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Hyperloop, if you build it, they will come, imposter syndrome, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, longitudinal study, Martin Parr, meritocracy, meta-analysis, microaggression, nudge theory, nudge unit, old-boy network, performance metric, psychological pricing, school choice, Skype, starchitect, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, work culture

The issue of self-elimination also highlights, more broadly, the profound emotional imprint that goes hand-in-hand with upward social mobility. While this impact is sometimes worn 173 The Class Ceiling lightly, as a reminder of how far one has come or what they have achieved, for the majority we interviewed ‘success’ came at a considerable psychological price. Upward journeys, we found, had often been difficult, uncomfortable, painful even. These emotional costs, we contend, are very important to understand. Not only do they constitute hidden injuries7 that may explain why some prefer not to reach for the top, but they also reveal the limits of the current political fetish for social mobility.


pages: 371 words: 36,271

Libertarian Idea by Jan Narveson

centre right, invisible hand, means of production, Menlo Park, night-watchman state, Pareto efficiency, Peter Singer: altruism, prisoner's dilemma, psychological pricing, rent-seeking, zero-sum game

At some point a tax becomes confiscatory or prohibitive, and few would deny that it then constitutes a genuine infringement of freedom. But before that point, what do we say? An important special case is that of moral pressure. Suppose I am a friend of yours and you know that I won‟t like it if you do x. This doesn‟t keep you from doing x at all, but it increases, as it were, the psychological price of doing it. Libertarians have a real problem here, for on the one hand they want to say that an individual has freedom of conscience (itself a vexed area); yet on the other, they can‟t easily say that we may blame anyone we please for just anything. If Jones has a perfect right to do x, can we blame Jones for doing x?


pages: 710 words: 164,527

The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order by Benn Steil

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, banks create money, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Charles Lindbergh, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, deindustrialization, European colonialism, facts on the ground, fiat currency, financial independence, floating exchange rates, full employment, global reserve currency, imperial preference, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, lateral thinking, low interest rates, margin call, means of production, Michael Milken, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Monroe Doctrine, New Journalism, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, open economy, Paul Samuelson, Potemkin village, price mechanism, price stability, psychological pricing, public intellectual, reserve currency, road to serfdom, seigniorage, South China Sea, special drawing rights, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Great Moderation, the market place, trade liberalization, Works Progress Administration

An astute, dedicated career diplomat would have played off the New York bankers, who were dangling loans in return for British opposition to the U.S. Treasury’s monetary reform plans, against FDR’s moneymen. But Keynes had a legacy to think of, and his place in the Bretton Woods pantheon was critical to it. The psychological price he paid for his persistence was bouts of a Stockholm syndrome variant, whereby he would persuade himself—and, with his unmatched rhetorical skills, the political class in London—that the American government, for all its intolerable legalism and defiance of reason, truly meant well and would do the right thing by Britain in the end.