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Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value
Prada stores carry a few obscenely expensive items in order to boost sales for everything else (which look like bargains in comparison). People used to download music for free, then Steve Jobs convinced them to pay. How? By charging 99 cents. That price has a hypnotic effect: the profit margin of the 99 Cents Only store is twice that of Wal-Mart. Why do text messages cost money, while e-mails are free? Why do jars of peanut butter keep getting smaller in order to keep the price the “same”? The answer is simple: prices are a collective hallucination.
In Priceless, the bestselling author William Poundstone reveals the hidden psychology of value. In psychological experiments, people are unable to estimate “fair” prices accurately and are strongly influenced by the unconscious, irrational, and politically incorrect. It hasn’t taken long for marketers to apply these findings. “Price consultants” advise retailers on how to convince consumers to pay more for less, and negotiation coaches offer similar advice for businesspeople cutting deals. The new psychology of price dictates the design of price tags, menus, rebates, “sale” ads, cell phone plans, supermarket aisles, real estate offers, wage packages, tort demands, and corporate buyouts. Prices are the most pervasive hidden persuaders of all. Rooted in the emerging field of behavioral decision theory, Priceless should prove indispensable to anyone who negotiates.
336 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2010
334 people are currently reading
6241 people want to read
About the author
William Poundstone
55 books367 followersWilliam Poundstone is the author of more than ten non-fiction books, including 'Fortune's Formula', which was the Amazon Editors' Pick for #1 non-fiction book of 2005. Poundstone has written for The New York Times, Psychology Today, Esquire, Harpers, The Economist, and Harvard Business Review. He has appeared on the Today Show, The David Letterman Show and hundreds of radio talk-shows throughout the world. Poundstone studied physics at MIT and many of his ideas concern the social and financial impact of scientific ideas. His books have sold over half a million copies worldwide.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 198 reviews
March 4, 2016
This book's big idea: Normal people under average contemporary circumstances can consistently be hoodwinked into making decisions against their own economic interest.
Define “normal people” as anyone with an average attention span and average load of worries, cares, responsibilities, and distractions.
Define “average contemporary circumstances” as the usual places and times when people are compelled to spend money, e.g., in crowded and noisy stores or markets, under the influence of salespeople on commission, or through websites designed in a deliberately manipulative manner.
Given the above, few people can do calculations in their heads with, at most, three or four variables. Most will struggle with two variables. A consulting industry, presumably populated by grown-ups with the same moral character as single-cell organisms, has grown up around exploiting this weakness in the human character. The result is the proliferation of unnecessarily complicated pricing systems and commercial gimmicks, including but not limited to customer loyalty programs, rebates, and cell phone contracts of Byzantine complexity. Faced with this, customers (also occasionally called in the book, I am not making this up, “suckers”) can then be distracted by a single high or low number, which the confused brain will seize on as the basis for a (bad) decision.
When younger, I was considered something of an extremist because I voiced the opinion that, if people who knowingly aided in the economic exploitation of other members of their society were publicly garrotted at half-time during the Super Bowl, and their corpses hung from the goalposts while birds pecked out their eyes, it might cut down on the number of people who participated in such exploitation, thus benefitting society. However, I have mellowed and become more conservative, a result of old age (certainly) and wisdom (perhaps). I now believe that people deserve an opportunity to reconsider the error of their ways. So perhaps all that needs to be done is to put exploiters in the stocks and pelt them with old fruits and vegetables, to let them know that their activities are not universally approved-of. Strangely, this comparatively-reasonable opinion, when voiced, still makes people move away from me at social gatherings.
But I digress.
In summary, this book is a readable popular summary of the disciplined and painstaking research which shows that, while crowds might have some wisdom, the individuals and small groups that make most economic decisions have very little.
Interviews with the author about this book on National Public Radio's "The Splendid Table" here and on "Marketplace" here.
Define “normal people” as anyone with an average attention span and average load of worries, cares, responsibilities, and distractions.
Define “average contemporary circumstances” as the usual places and times when people are compelled to spend money, e.g., in crowded and noisy stores or markets, under the influence of salespeople on commission, or through websites designed in a deliberately manipulative manner.
Given the above, few people can do calculations in their heads with, at most, three or four variables. Most will struggle with two variables. A consulting industry, presumably populated by grown-ups with the same moral character as single-cell organisms, has grown up around exploiting this weakness in the human character. The result is the proliferation of unnecessarily complicated pricing systems and commercial gimmicks, including but not limited to customer loyalty programs, rebates, and cell phone contracts of Byzantine complexity. Faced with this, customers (also occasionally called in the book, I am not making this up, “suckers”) can then be distracted by a single high or low number, which the confused brain will seize on as the basis for a (bad) decision.
When younger, I was considered something of an extremist because I voiced the opinion that, if people who knowingly aided in the economic exploitation of other members of their society were publicly garrotted at half-time during the Super Bowl, and their corpses hung from the goalposts while birds pecked out their eyes, it might cut down on the number of people who participated in such exploitation, thus benefitting society. However, I have mellowed and become more conservative, a result of old age (certainly) and wisdom (perhaps). I now believe that people deserve an opportunity to reconsider the error of their ways. So perhaps all that needs to be done is to put exploiters in the stocks and pelt them with old fruits and vegetables, to let them know that their activities are not universally approved-of. Strangely, this comparatively-reasonable opinion, when voiced, still makes people move away from me at social gatherings.
But I digress.
In summary, this book is a readable popular summary of the disciplined and painstaking research which shows that, while crowds might have some wisdom, the individuals and small groups that make most economic decisions have very little.
Interviews with the author about this book on National Public Radio's "The Splendid Table" here and on "Marketplace" here.
July 9, 2018
Очень интересная книга, где автор делится иследованиями в области психологии цен. Вся книга построена на основе поведеньческой теории принятия решений. Книга подойдет всем, кто покупает, продает или ведет переговоры.
June 29, 2021
Очень качественный материал об исследованиях в области теории принятия решений и их влиянии на возникновение всякого рода фишечек современного ценообразования.
Достаточно просто и доступно описана теория, но даже если к ней будут вопросики то в каждом разделе реальный пример, который окончательно все разложит по полкам.
Познавательно, приятно, хорошо.
Достаточно просто и доступно описана теория, но даже если к ней будут вопросики то в каждом разделе реальный пример, который окончательно все разложит по полкам.
Познавательно, приятно, хорошо.
July 8, 2010
I've always been interested in the psychology of consumerism, along with related topics like marketing and purchasing behaviors. Both for how shameless it is and how readily we (myself included) seem to fall for what really amount to simple psychological slight of hand. Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (And How to Take Advantage of It) by William Poundstone looked like it was going to scratch that itch, and while it does to some extent I'm left a little off balance by the book.
If you look at Priceless as a whole, it seems to hit a lot of the right notes for me. It takes practical questions like why we buy what we do and why marketers do what they do, and it answers them by turning to theories and well established phenomenon from psychology --most notably Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman's prospect theory. There's chapters on how menu consultants use psychological anchoring and the contrast effect to get you to order what they want, an examination of the effectiveness of prices ending in ".99" and other such "charm" numbers, the allure of all-you-can-eat buffets, the power of breaking out many small benefits in a sales pitch (i.e., the "But wait! There's more!" trope), and other such fascinating topics. And overall I'd say it's a good read for all that.
The main thing that keeps me from whole heartedly recommending Priceless to any reader, though, is that none of that good stuff really starts until page 143 out of about 290. The entire front HALF of the book focuses less on the specifics I listed above and more on the general case of prospect theory and its history. In places it reads more like a mini-biography of Kahneman and Tversky as well as some of their predecessors. And when he's not doing this "history of science" thing, Poundstone is going into some pretty gnarly specifics on the science (both from psychology and economics) of all this. Now personally, I loved all this and ate it up because while I knew most of it I was interested to get some biographical information and see it all in a different context. It's just kind of hard to recommend to someone who's walking into the topic without any other education.
And while the book does turn the corner halfway through when it starts getting into some practical and fascinating specifics, those chapters do assume that you've read and understood most of the stuff in the earlier, technical parts. The discussion of our preference for all-expenses-included vacation resorts, for example, assumes that you grokked an earlier discussion about the convex nature of the value function to the left of an individual's reference point. Or somesuch.
It's an interesting way to structure the book, as opposed to the typical approach of tackling one topic (say menu design or the fallibility of real estate agents) and then presenting all the related research in one chapter. One advantage to the approach in Priceless is that the latter, topical chapters are all really short, averaging just 3 or 4 pages each. I think this will make it a pretty good reference book and I enjoyed it overall, but any recommendation has to come with the caveot that you should know what you're in for.
If you look at Priceless as a whole, it seems to hit a lot of the right notes for me. It takes practical questions like why we buy what we do and why marketers do what they do, and it answers them by turning to theories and well established phenomenon from psychology --most notably Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman's prospect theory. There's chapters on how menu consultants use psychological anchoring and the contrast effect to get you to order what they want, an examination of the effectiveness of prices ending in ".99" and other such "charm" numbers, the allure of all-you-can-eat buffets, the power of breaking out many small benefits in a sales pitch (i.e., the "But wait! There's more!" trope), and other such fascinating topics. And overall I'd say it's a good read for all that.
The main thing that keeps me from whole heartedly recommending Priceless to any reader, though, is that none of that good stuff really starts until page 143 out of about 290. The entire front HALF of the book focuses less on the specifics I listed above and more on the general case of prospect theory and its history. In places it reads more like a mini-biography of Kahneman and Tversky as well as some of their predecessors. And when he's not doing this "history of science" thing, Poundstone is going into some pretty gnarly specifics on the science (both from psychology and economics) of all this. Now personally, I loved all this and ate it up because while I knew most of it I was interested to get some biographical information and see it all in a different context. It's just kind of hard to recommend to someone who's walking into the topic without any other education.
And while the book does turn the corner halfway through when it starts getting into some practical and fascinating specifics, those chapters do assume that you've read and understood most of the stuff in the earlier, technical parts. The discussion of our preference for all-expenses-included vacation resorts, for example, assumes that you grokked an earlier discussion about the convex nature of the value function to the left of an individual's reference point. Or somesuch.
It's an interesting way to structure the book, as opposed to the typical approach of tackling one topic (say menu design or the fallibility of real estate agents) and then presenting all the related research in one chapter. One advantage to the approach in Priceless is that the latter, topical chapters are all really short, averaging just 3 or 4 pages each. I think this will make it a pretty good reference book and I enjoyed it overall, but any recommendation has to come with the caveot that you should know what you're in for.
February 4, 2017
اگه همین الان قرار باشه یک بسته نمک رو ارزشگذاری کنین، آیا رقم هزار تومن خوبه یا نه؟ آیا قیمت یک بسته نمک خوراکی باید بالاتر یا پایینتر از هزار تومن باشه؟ نمک کالاییه که به کررات خریداری نمیشه. یعنی هر روز یا هر هفته نمیخریمش. این خودش یکی از عواملیه که باعث میشه تعیین قیمتش برای ما سخت باشه. البته عوامل دیگهای هم دخیله. مثلا اینکه این جنس توی سبد کالای ما بخش ناچیزیه. در نتیجه بالا یا پایین رفتن قیمتش برای ما مهم نیست (کشش قیمتی). ولی اگه نمک فروش باشین و قیمت هر بسته رو کمی بالا یا پایین کنین، تفاوت تاثیرگذاری رو میبینین؛ ممکنه ورشکست بشین یا حاشیه سودتون چند برابر بشه.
موضوع این کتاب در مورد قیمت و انعطافپذیر بودن ادراک ما از قیمتهاست. اصولا ما نمیدونیم قیمت کالاها و خدمات چقدره و برای به دست آوردن قیمتی که حس کنیم عادلانه و مناسب باشه باید کالا یا خدمت مورد نظر رو با کالاها و خدمات مشابه یا جایگزین یا قیمت اونها در گذشته و یا اصلا یک معیار بیربط دیگه مقایسه کنیم. به بیان دیگه، ارزبابی نسبی ما از چیزها تقریبا هماهنگ و ثابته، اما رقم ریالی این ارزشگذاری معمولا خیلی متفاوته. قیمت مطلق وجود نداره و همه چیز نسبیه. منتها ممکنه این نسبی بودن توی شرایط مختلف به گونه متفاوتی به سود یا به ضرر ما باشه. فروشندهها و خریدارها چطور میتونن شرایطی ایجاد کنن که از این نسبی بودن بهرهبرداری کنن و بیشترین سود و کمترین ضرر رو ببینن.
وقتی قرار باشه یک کالا یا خدمتی که تا حالا باهاش سرو کار نداشتیم رو ارزشگذاری کنیم، به دنبال نشانههایی میگردیم که بتونیم ازش کمک بگیریم. اینجا عواملی میتونن روی ادراک ما تاثیرگذار باشن که الزاما ربطی به ارزش خود اون چیز نداشته باشه. یکی از این عوامل چیزیه که بهش میگیم «تکیهگاه». مثلا رقم هزار تومن که برای بسته نمک مطرح شد، دقیقا همین نقش رو داره؛ یک رقم پیشنهادی که شما برای ارزیابی اولیه بهش فکر میکنین. این رقم کاملا حدسی بود و از خودم درآوردم. من هم نمیدونم یک بسته نمک چند تومنه. منتها توی ارزیابی ما معمولا این طور ارقام مبنا واقع میشن و بر اساس گروون بودن یا ارزون بودن نمک توی ذهن ما، ارزیابی خودمون رو یک مقدار اصلاح میکنیم. مثلا اگه گفته بودم آیا پونزده هزار تومن برای یک بسته نمک خوبه یا نه، تقریبا همه میدونستن که زیاده. اما اگه بعدش میپرسیدم چند تومن مناسبه، اون وقت رقمی که فرد پیشنهاد میکرد خیلی بالاتر از قیمتی میبود که توی مورد هزار تومن ارزیابی میکرده بود(ویگولنزجگ). این مورد به کررات توی جاهای مختلف آزمایش شده و به اثبات رسیده.
این موضوع برای خیلی از مشاغل اهمیت داره. مثلا برندهای پوشاک لوکس معمولا اجناسی دارن که خیلی گرونه. یک کیف دستی زنانه از خز پلنگ میتونه تا هفتاد هزار دلار قیمت داشته باشه. یک ساعت مچی طلا با تزئین الماس سیاه رو تا یک میلیون دلار هم قیمت گذاشتن. منتها معمولا این طور اجناس به فروش نمیرن. یعنی تولیدکننده از اول میدونه که قرار نیست این جنس رو بفروشه. چند دونه ازش تولید می کنن و با دکوراسیون تجملی و تشریفاتی می ذارنشون توی فروشگاه های مراکز بزرگ و اصلی و البته براش تبلیغ میکنن. منتها عموم مردم این چیزها رو نمیخرن، اگه هم بخرن که چه بهتر. اونها دوست دارن منزلت اجتماعی ناشی از این برند رو داشته باشن اما هزینه گزاف این کالا رو نپردازن. وقتی میرن به فروشگاههای این برندها، خرید یک کیف زنانه از چرم شترمرغ به قیمت سه هزار دلار در برابر اون کیف پوست پلنگی خیلی منطقیتر به نظر میرسه. یا یک ساعت بیست هزار دلاری از همون برند منتها از مدل دیگه. اون تکیهگاه باعث میشه قیمت جنسی که فروشنده از اول به دنبال فروشش بوده مناسب جلوه کنه. با این کار استاندارد قیمتها توی ذهن خریدار بالاتر میره.
علاوه بر این، عوامل دیگهای هم برای مناسب جلوه دادن قیمت وجود داره. با توجه به اینکه اینترنت دسترسی ما رو به اطلاعات ساده کرده، در نتیجه برای فروشندهها مهمه روشهایی رو به کار بگیرن که مقایسه قیمتها و تعیین معیار قیمت به عنوان عامل تعیین کننده مطرح نشه تا بتونن سود کنن.
در نهایت اینکه ضربالمثل «هر چقدر پول بدی، همون قدر آش میخوری» الزاما درست نیست. ممکنه آش کمتر و با کیفیتتر گرونتری بخوری، ممکنه آش گرون اما معمولی ولی پخته شده توسط آشپز معروفتر یا رستوران تشریفاتیتری رو بخوری، ممکنه آش بیشتر و ارزونتری بخوری، شاید آش بیکیفیت گرون رو به این دلیل بخوری که رستوران توی ایستگاه کوهپیمایی واقع شده و گزینه دیگهای نداری، ممکنه به دلیل نذری بودن یا کمک به خیریه ی�� عوامل دیگه آشهایی با قیمتهای خیلی بالا یا خیلی پایین و حتا رایگان بخوری. قیمت آش مطلق نیست.
در کنار اینها، درک ما از عادلانه بود قیمت، ریسک، سود، ضرر، احتمال و موارد دیگه هم توی کتاب مطرح شدن. که با مطرح کردن آزمایشها و نظرسنجیهای مختلف مستند شده بودن.
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یک سری مشکلاتی توی این آزمایشهای رفتارشناسی و جامعهشناسی وجود داره که بنیادیان. اینکه چرایی رفتار آدمیزاد رو تا حد زیادی نمیدونیم. یعنی تا حدی اصلا نمیتونیم بدونیم. حتا وقتی خودشون دلیلی برای انجام کارشون داشته باشن ممکنه الزاما اون چیزی نباشه که بیان میکنن. عواملی که تاثیرگذارن اونقدر زیادن که منتسب کردن یک رفتار به یک علت کار پر از تردید و شکه.
شاید یکم بیش از حد روی موضوع «تکیهگاه» و روشهای به کار گیریش متمرکز شده بود. تقریبا همه کتاب حول همین محور میچرخید. اما در کل خوب بود.
موضوع این کتاب در مورد قیمت و انعطافپذیر بودن ادراک ما از قیمتهاست. اصولا ما نمیدونیم قیمت کالاها و خدمات چقدره و برای به دست آوردن قیمتی که حس کنیم عادلانه و مناسب باشه باید کالا یا خدمت مورد نظر رو با کالاها و خدمات مشابه یا جایگزین یا قیمت اونها در گذشته و یا اصلا یک معیار بیربط دیگه مقایسه کنیم. به بیان دیگه، ارزبابی نسبی ما از چیزها تقریبا هماهنگ و ثابته، اما رقم ریالی این ارزشگذاری معمولا خیلی متفاوته. قیمت مطلق وجود نداره و همه چیز نسبیه. منتها ممکنه این نسبی بودن توی شرایط مختلف به گونه متفاوتی به سود یا به ضرر ما باشه. فروشندهها و خریدارها چطور میتونن شرایطی ایجاد کنن که از این نسبی بودن بهرهبرداری کنن و بیشترین سود و کمترین ضرر رو ببینن.
وقتی قرار باشه یک کالا یا خدمتی که تا حالا باهاش سرو کار نداشتیم رو ارزشگذاری کنیم، به دنبال نشانههایی میگردیم که بتونیم ازش کمک بگیریم. اینجا عواملی میتونن روی ادراک ما تاثیرگذار باشن که الزاما ربطی به ارزش خود اون چیز نداشته باشه. یکی از این عوامل چیزیه که بهش میگیم «تکیهگاه». مثلا رقم هزار تومن که برای بسته نمک مطرح شد، دقیقا همین نقش رو داره؛ یک رقم پیشنهادی که شما برای ارزیابی اولیه بهش فکر میکنین. این رقم کاملا حدسی بود و از خودم درآوردم. من هم نمیدونم یک بسته نمک چند تومنه. منتها توی ارزیابی ما معمولا این طور ارقام مبنا واقع میشن و بر اساس گروون بودن یا ارزون بودن نمک توی ذهن ما، ارزیابی خودمون رو یک مقدار اصلاح میکنیم. مثلا اگه گفته بودم آیا پونزده هزار تومن برای یک بسته نمک خوبه یا نه، تقریبا همه میدونستن که زیاده. اما اگه بعدش میپرسیدم چند تومن مناسبه، اون وقت رقمی که فرد پیشنهاد میکرد خیلی بالاتر از قیمتی میبود که توی مورد هزار تومن ارزیابی میکرده بود(ویگولنزجگ). این مورد به کررات توی جاهای مختلف آزمایش شده و به اثبات رسیده.
این موضوع برای خیلی از مشاغل اهمیت داره. مثلا برندهای پوشاک لوکس معمولا اجناسی دارن که خیلی گرونه. یک کیف دستی زنانه از خز پلنگ میتونه تا هفتاد هزار دلار قیمت داشته باشه. یک ساعت مچی طلا با تزئین الماس سیاه رو تا یک میلیون دلار هم قیمت گذاشتن. منتها معمولا این طور اجناس به فروش نمیرن. یعنی تولیدکننده از اول میدونه که قرار نیست این جنس رو بفروشه. چند دونه ازش تولید می کنن و با دکوراسیون تجملی و تشریفاتی می ذارنشون توی فروشگاه های مراکز بزرگ و اصلی و البته براش تبلیغ میکنن. منتها عموم مردم این چیزها رو نمیخرن، اگه هم بخرن که چه بهتر. اونها دوست دارن منزلت اجتماعی ناشی از این برند رو داشته باشن اما هزینه گزاف این کالا رو نپردازن. وقتی میرن به فروشگاههای این برندها، خرید یک کیف زنانه از چرم شترمرغ به قیمت سه هزار دلار در برابر اون کیف پوست پلنگی خیلی منطقیتر به نظر میرسه. یا یک ساعت بیست هزار دلاری از همون برند منتها از مدل دیگه. اون تکیهگاه باعث میشه قیمت جنسی که فروشنده از اول به دنبال فروشش بوده مناسب جلوه کنه. با این کار استاندارد قیمتها توی ذهن خریدار بالاتر میره.
علاوه بر این، عوامل دیگهای هم برای مناسب جلوه دادن قیمت وجود داره. با توجه به اینکه اینترنت دسترسی ما رو به اطلاعات ساده کرده، در نتیجه برای فروشندهها مهمه روشهایی رو به کار بگیرن که مقایسه قیمتها و تعیین معیار قیمت به عنوان عامل تعیین کننده مطرح نشه تا بتونن سود کنن.
در نهایت اینکه ضربالمثل «هر چقدر پول بدی، همون قدر آش میخوری» الزاما درست نیست. ممکنه آش کمتر و با کیفیتتر گرونتری بخوری، ممکنه آش گرون اما معمولی ولی پخته شده توسط آشپز معروفتر یا رستوران تشریفاتیتری رو بخوری، ممکنه آش بیشتر و ارزونتری بخوری، شاید آش بیکیفیت گرون رو به این دلیل بخوری که رستوران توی ایستگاه کوهپیمایی واقع شده و گزینه دیگهای نداری، ممکنه به دلیل نذری بودن یا کمک به خیریه ی�� عوامل دیگه آشهایی با قیمتهای خیلی بالا یا خیلی پایین و حتا رایگان بخوری. قیمت آش مطلق نیست.
در کنار اینها، درک ما از عادلانه بود قیمت، ریسک، سود، ضرر، احتمال و موارد دیگه هم توی کتاب مطرح شدن. که با مطرح کردن آزمایشها و نظرسنجیهای مختلف مستند شده بودن.
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یک سری مشکلاتی توی این آزمایشهای رفتارشناسی و جامعهشناسی وجود داره که بنیادیان. اینکه چرایی رفتار آدمیزاد رو تا حد زیادی نمیدونیم. یعنی تا حدی اصلا نمیتونیم بدونیم. حتا وقتی خودشون دلیلی برای انجام کارشون داشته باشن ممکنه الزاما اون چیزی نباشه که بیان میکنن. عواملی که تاثیرگذارن اونقدر زیادن که منتسب کردن یک رفتار به یک علت کار پر از تردید و شکه.
شاید یکم بیش از حد روی موضوع «تکیهگاه» و روشهای به کار گیریش متمرکز شده بود. تقریبا همه کتاب حول همین محور میچرخید. اما در کل خوب بود.
October 28, 2022
**NOTE: I did NOT finishing reading the book.**
I read parts I and II and some of IV; however, this book started strong and then went down a winding road of random studies and statistics. This may be a good read for someone very interested in this specific topic. Apologies to those I may offend by leaving a review without reading the entire book. My bad!
I read parts I and II and some of IV; however, this book started strong and then went down a winding road of random studies and statistics. This may be a good read for someone very interested in this specific topic. Apologies to those I may offend by leaving a review without reading the entire book. My bad!
April 9, 2011
Oscar Wilde once said, "The cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing." William Poundstone might argue that the average person doesn't know the price of anything, either. Or, rather, that prices are arbitrary constructions that aren't really based on value at all.
Priceless is a foray into behavioral economics and social psychology as they apply to price and money. A lot of the research Poundstone brings forward I knew about already, and giants in the field (such as Tversky, Kaneman, and Ariely) are amply represented. But really, Priceless is a walk through our own minds and how we come up with the price we're willing to pay for things, especially when we have no reference points.
Taken together, the results of all this research could be disheartening. They show that people are easily manipulated by "anchors" (i.e. a reference number, which may be completely random), even while insisting that anchors have no effect on them. People will pay more for a steak dinner (or anything else, really) if there's a super-expensive option presented that no one buys. Just having the super-expensive $150 steak on the menu makes your $50 plate of chicken seem far more reasonable a purchase.
And on and on. Why did the jury award $2.9 to Stella Liebeck in the infamous "I spilled coffee on my lap" case against McDonalds? Because her lawyer suggested that the jury award punitive damages equal to "one or two days of the company's worldwide coffee sales." This is completely arbitrary (why worldwide? why coffee sales? why a day or two?), but it framed the question and led to a the multi-million dollar fine.
Priceless demonstrates that people pay astronomical prices for things they don't want. They'll claim one deal is better and yet consistently chose another. Their interactions with strangers change when there are other people looking, or even just a picture of eyes. Their preferences change drastically when even a small amount of uncertainty (1%) is introduced. Or when they're presented with something "free." And, through everything, they'll continue to insist that these criteria have absolutely no effect on them.
It's a fascinating read and worth it to know (and attempt to counter) your internal biases. Recommended.
Priceless is a foray into behavioral economics and social psychology as they apply to price and money. A lot of the research Poundstone brings forward I knew about already, and giants in the field (such as Tversky, Kaneman, and Ariely) are amply represented. But really, Priceless is a walk through our own minds and how we come up with the price we're willing to pay for things, especially when we have no reference points.
Taken together, the results of all this research could be disheartening. They show that people are easily manipulated by "anchors" (i.e. a reference number, which may be completely random), even while insisting that anchors have no effect on them. People will pay more for a steak dinner (or anything else, really) if there's a super-expensive option presented that no one buys. Just having the super-expensive $150 steak on the menu makes your $50 plate of chicken seem far more reasonable a purchase.
And on and on. Why did the jury award $2.9 to Stella Liebeck in the infamous "I spilled coffee on my lap" case against McDonalds? Because her lawyer suggested that the jury award punitive damages equal to "one or two days of the company's worldwide coffee sales." This is completely arbitrary (why worldwide? why coffee sales? why a day or two?), but it framed the question and led to a the multi-million dollar fine.
Priceless demonstrates that people pay astronomical prices for things they don't want. They'll claim one deal is better and yet consistently chose another. Their interactions with strangers change when there are other people looking, or even just a picture of eyes. Their preferences change drastically when even a small amount of uncertainty (1%) is introduced. Or when they're presented with something "free." And, through everything, they'll continue to insist that these criteria have absolutely no effect on them.
It's a fascinating read and worth it to know (and attempt to counter) your internal biases. Recommended.
October 16, 2018
This book IS PRICELESS!
I haven't read a book like Priceless by William Poundstone in a long, long time. Now, I've been reading many books (have even written one) & have shared some of my extraordinary finds, but Priceless IS 'Priceless' for many reasons:
- The sheer scope of applicability! You can read AND use this book almost instantaneously in everyday life.
- The sheer volume of real-life examples, case studies, experiments and business applications makes this more of a textbook more than a commercial book!
- while it would be compromising to share the details of the book, some of the startling tenets that get embedded in the readers' mind (I'm guessing forever) are
-- 'The more you ask for, the more you get
-- The humungous proof of 'anchoring' and how it completely changes the way you price and negotiate things.
The book is replete with innumerable examples relating to pricing - that includes human psychology, maths, positioning, strategy, even visuals and UI/UX.
To get the best of this book, I would suggest reading it repeatedly over the years.
Rating - 100/10.
I haven't read a book like Priceless by William Poundstone in a long, long time. Now, I've been reading many books (have even written one) & have shared some of my extraordinary finds, but Priceless IS 'Priceless' for many reasons:
- The sheer scope of applicability! You can read AND use this book almost instantaneously in everyday life.
- The sheer volume of real-life examples, case studies, experiments and business applications makes this more of a textbook more than a commercial book!
- while it would be compromising to share the details of the book, some of the startling tenets that get embedded in the readers' mind (I'm guessing forever) are
-- 'The more you ask for, the more you get
-- The humungous proof of 'anchoring' and how it completely changes the way you price and negotiate things.
The book is replete with innumerable examples relating to pricing - that includes human psychology, maths, positioning, strategy, even visuals and UI/UX.
To get the best of this book, I would suggest reading it repeatedly over the years.
Rating - 100/10.
March 21, 2018
This was interesting and informative as fuck. Not just for marketers (although it is tremendously useful for the field), but for the everyday consumer.
Every chapter was peppered with anecdotes and case studies where you saw people acting in peculiar ways according to internal prompts they didn't know they were following. The author then explained what the researchers extrapolated from that, and the resulting rules of thumb for pricing/ marketing.
Perhaps the only criticism I can offer is that some of the earlier chapters were somewhat boring stories of old researchers with not much relation to the topic at hand. They felt like pointless filler. Nevertheless, the rest made up for it in spades.
Every chapter was peppered with anecdotes and case studies where you saw people acting in peculiar ways according to internal prompts they didn't know they were following. The author then explained what the researchers extrapolated from that, and the resulting rules of thumb for pricing/ marketing.
Perhaps the only criticism I can offer is that some of the earlier chapters were somewhat boring stories of old researchers with not much relation to the topic at hand. They felt like pointless filler. Nevertheless, the rest made up for it in spades.
September 16, 2013
I would give this book 3.5 stars, not because of his writing style, but my personal preferences. Definitely some great stuff on economics and behavior psychology, but too dense on the descriptions of each and every study done over the years. I would prefer just to have the main takeaways of each. You can read a book summary of this one at Actionable Books: http://www.actionablebooks.com/summar...
March 11, 2020
For a psychology nerd like me, it was a great read. The book has detailed, experiments after experiments related to pricing, valuation (products), negotiation tactics (related to pricing) and other psychological concepts such as anchoring and prospect theory.
Couple of reasons why it was a little downer for me were,
- I bought it with an expectation to learn "how to price products", maybe based on real examples of the popular consumer products. Sadly, this wasn't to be found anywhere. In fact, only about a handful of products were mentioned in this regard and even they did not shed much light on how they were priced.
- If the author assumes of his readers to take the concepts of pricing from this book and apply those effectively in real-life scenarios then a good way to do that would have been a conclusion listing all the concepts at the end. As I said, because it's just reams of experiments contained in there, it's quite difficult to keep going back to recall a particular concept or learnings from a particular experiment.
But even then, as I said, the content inside is really good. A lot of things were new for me; hence, very interesting to know.
The book also emphasized upon some common human behaviour with respect to pricing, such as,
- Nobody knows what the actual price of a product is. Not the buyer. Not even the seller.
- Anchoring is a potent method to get the price you want for anything.
- The effect of money, alcohol, gender and even fairness while making price / wage related decisions
- Selling not the entire product but as a layer of features
- Charm Pricing and the value of zeroes
And a whole lot more.
Couple of reasons why it was a little downer for me were,
- I bought it with an expectation to learn "how to price products", maybe based on real examples of the popular consumer products. Sadly, this wasn't to be found anywhere. In fact, only about a handful of products were mentioned in this regard and even they did not shed much light on how they were priced.
- If the author assumes of his readers to take the concepts of pricing from this book and apply those effectively in real-life scenarios then a good way to do that would have been a conclusion listing all the concepts at the end. As I said, because it's just reams of experiments contained in there, it's quite difficult to keep going back to recall a particular concept or learnings from a particular experiment.
But even then, as I said, the content inside is really good. A lot of things were new for me; hence, very interesting to know.
The book also emphasized upon some common human behaviour with respect to pricing, such as,
- Nobody knows what the actual price of a product is. Not the buyer. Not even the seller.
- Anchoring is a potent method to get the price you want for anything.
- The effect of money, alcohol, gender and even fairness while making price / wage related decisions
- Selling not the entire product but as a layer of features
- Charm Pricing and the value of zeroes
And a whole lot more.
May 8, 2024
Lost of experiments described in the book are already well known but putted here densely and with a clear focus to show how we interpret prices and make decisions - that was an interesting read!
December 17, 2020
An exploration of the psychology of pricing. The book lays out some high-level theories that relate to pricing and then details experiments that show some interesting features of human behavior as it relates to pricing and value. There are some interesting nuggets about how people react to the idea of fairness and how many elements of consumer experience are manipulated. It's a bit hard to put your finger on a central insight, the book sort of ends with a shrug.
April 17, 2019
This is an interesting book about price.
Its written for business people. Chapters are short and punchy with a form as regular as poetry; a set-up, investigation, explanation and then musing on meaning.
"One of America's longest-running Guy Grand pranks takes place every day just off 1-40 in Amarillo. A giant steer statue us blazoned with a sign advertising a FREE 72 OZ STEAK."
From here we descend into the Gospel of Poundstone, or more like the Torah of Poundstone as the Gospels themselves are micro stories of the lives and investigations of academics, economists, psychologists and business people investigating the nature of prices.
There is a study, or a series of studies, or a 'latest study', which takes place in a lab, in the U.S. or Israel. These labs are like temples of logical knowledge which issue out these subtle riddles of behaviour or thought which are meant to reveal something about humanity and the way it thinks. In one scene a guy in the U.S. constructs a room in a building that _invisibly tilts on its axis due to hidden workings_, this is to measure if or how much people are aware of their actual balance without meaningful cues. The room is set to lure people in with fake free eye tests and then to move around secretly and see if they notice.
(People sense something is wrong, but they often don't relate it to movement.)
The riddle is considered, examples are given.
Some thought is dedicated to the overall meaning of the consequences should the riddle be found to be a full truth. But only for a few paragraphs. The chapters are short, like blog posts, magazine articles. They are *punchy*. Constructed like SEO-optimised trade-speak clickbait blog posts. Artfully constructed; bit of human interest, bit of academic soap opera, bit of theory, dab of mathematics, knowing tie-up at the end.
So those are the onrushing pebbles of Poundstones argument. They never entirely or purely cohere into a directly-stated synthesis or final statement. But it is not hard to work out his meaning. His argument is that the prices for a lot of things are very close to being imaginary.
You probably have a rough personal intuition of how imaginary or made-up most prices are; well double that, or maybe triple it, or increase it by a factor of something. It is all light and air, or so it would seem.
Humans judge by ratio very keenly and are totally bonkers when it comes to abstract values. If you want to change someone’s thoughts about pricing, change the ratios that are present when someone thinks about it. Therein lies almost all of everything anyone ever did to find a way to raise a price.
Humans assign value by primate-relevant qualities. Considering Price, alone, deeply, actually brings you back into contact with the whole of the human experience, because when assigning an abstract value to something, it seems that what really matters is human context. People draw from their entire physical and social experience of the world when negotiating with each other.
In particular, people are much more loss-averse than they are success hungry, and they are much, _much_ more averse to letting someone treat them in an 'unfair' way than they are desirous of getting free, or extra, resources.
So people will literally turn down a free lunch if it comes with an assumed loss of relative status or participation in a deal in which someone is seen to have an unfair advantage over them, even if in rational absolute terms they only gain by the exchange.
So, 'value', though seemingly abstract, is like a puncture hole though the skin into a deeply human world of social networks, personal status, testosterone levels, fear of loss, desire to impress and just a very apelike, living, human experience of reality.
Heuristics are a thing. Humans use simple, usually ratio-based intuitive shortcuts based on environmental factors in order to work out the value of thigs. When considered singly, isolated away from their ecology of thought and zoned-in on in a lab, all of these heuristics break down. They are 'non-logical' and can be made to be wrong with tricks of logic.
The question of how powerful this effect is in real-life is a primary moral axis of the book. Unusually, Economists and Humanists are on the same side in this one, they both want the decisions people make to 'make sense' and to be fundamentally rational, or at least, reasonable. Even if they break down in the lab it is hoped human decision making works 'as a whole'.
Poundstone seems to be on the other side, the general drift of his argument is that prices are deeply and worryingly ethereal and much of human value-assignment is basically a holodeck episode.
Takeaways;
Priceless absolutely abounds in factoids, little slivers and pieces of counter-intuitive, strange or just interesting discoveries and secrets. Here are a few;
There is/was a weird culture war/intellectual war between Economists and Psychologists. Economists seem to move in an ethereal realm of pure figures and absolute values on which the great machinery of their thought is based. Psychologists are a bit dirty, manipulative and fluid, they chew away at the absolute values Economists need to build their palaces, revealing them to be little more than dreams.
So in the partial history of the relations between Psychologists and Economists that makes up a strand of the book, Economists have a habit of just straight-out dismissing anything Psychologists say with "Oh, _psychology_)", at least for the start of the book. So that is an interesting example of subjects or cultures deciding to just not talk to each other. Or at least, not to listen.
..............
'Anchoring', shaping assumptions on price by opening with a super-high figure, works much much much better than most people intuit it does. It works on the average Joe, and it works on experts, it works on people who decide quickly, and it works on people who consider deeply. The depth to which you have thought about something, alone, does not meaningfully change the extent to which Anchoring will work on you.
.............
"Fisher aspired to predict prices from supply and demand. His thesis described how to do that, and Fisher went so far as to build a price-generating machine (see page 225). It was a tank of water with a flotilla of half-flooded wooden "cisterns" connected by a system of levers. Adjustments to "stoppers" and levers fed in data on incomes, marginal utilities, and supplies; then prices could be read off scales. Gibbs must have been pleased. The device prefigured, if not parodied, the direction of twentieth-century economics. ("Press stopper I and raise III," read part of Fishers instructions for the thing. "I, II, III now represent a wealthy middle class and poor man respectively...")
.............
"I absolutely thought [pay] would go down because the disclosures would be so embarrassing," recalled Graef Crystal, an architect of those disclosure rules. "But it turned out that when somebody is hauling in $200 million, he's not embarrassable."
.............
"After years of work-around like half-dozen cartons of eggs and ever-shrinking containers of milk, it bit the bullet and raised its top price to $99.99. For president Jeff Gold, it was almost like a death in the family. 'The number 99 is a magic number - deviating from that is something we absolutely are not taking lightly,' he said. 'I find significant discomfort emotionally about considering making the change.'
............
There is much much more, its something of a wunderkammer of these, more than it is a book almost.
There were layers to my response to 'Priceless'. I often found it 'clever', in a mildly frustrating way. The glib single-idea 'gotchas' of business writing or magazine articles. I intuitively strongly dislike what I perceived as a mild wash of slightly sneering superiority through the opening parts of the book.
Under that, its actually interesting. The basic deal is that price, which bills itself as a firm and near-abstract unit of measurement, is a deeply human construct. On the down side this means the world economy is largely a collective hallucination and could collapse or change hugely at any time. On the more positive (to me) side, Economics is not just a part of the Humanities, it’s actually a Romance. Piercing through the needle-dot of price reveals a cosmos of human emotion, human feeling and human social relationships, illogical, 'irrational', but making organic sense, not without reason or meaning and if not entirely within our control then at least within our capacity to understand.
Its written for business people. Chapters are short and punchy with a form as regular as poetry; a set-up, investigation, explanation and then musing on meaning.
"One of America's longest-running Guy Grand pranks takes place every day just off 1-40 in Amarillo. A giant steer statue us blazoned with a sign advertising a FREE 72 OZ STEAK."
From here we descend into the Gospel of Poundstone, or more like the Torah of Poundstone as the Gospels themselves are micro stories of the lives and investigations of academics, economists, psychologists and business people investigating the nature of prices.
There is a study, or a series of studies, or a 'latest study', which takes place in a lab, in the U.S. or Israel. These labs are like temples of logical knowledge which issue out these subtle riddles of behaviour or thought which are meant to reveal something about humanity and the way it thinks. In one scene a guy in the U.S. constructs a room in a building that _invisibly tilts on its axis due to hidden workings_, this is to measure if or how much people are aware of their actual balance without meaningful cues. The room is set to lure people in with fake free eye tests and then to move around secretly and see if they notice.
(People sense something is wrong, but they often don't relate it to movement.)
The riddle is considered, examples are given.
Some thought is dedicated to the overall meaning of the consequences should the riddle be found to be a full truth. But only for a few paragraphs. The chapters are short, like blog posts, magazine articles. They are *punchy*. Constructed like SEO-optimised trade-speak clickbait blog posts. Artfully constructed; bit of human interest, bit of academic soap opera, bit of theory, dab of mathematics, knowing tie-up at the end.
So those are the onrushing pebbles of Poundstones argument. They never entirely or purely cohere into a directly-stated synthesis or final statement. But it is not hard to work out his meaning. His argument is that the prices for a lot of things are very close to being imaginary.
You probably have a rough personal intuition of how imaginary or made-up most prices are; well double that, or maybe triple it, or increase it by a factor of something. It is all light and air, or so it would seem.
Humans judge by ratio very keenly and are totally bonkers when it comes to abstract values. If you want to change someone’s thoughts about pricing, change the ratios that are present when someone thinks about it. Therein lies almost all of everything anyone ever did to find a way to raise a price.
Humans assign value by primate-relevant qualities. Considering Price, alone, deeply, actually brings you back into contact with the whole of the human experience, because when assigning an abstract value to something, it seems that what really matters is human context. People draw from their entire physical and social experience of the world when negotiating with each other.
In particular, people are much more loss-averse than they are success hungry, and they are much, _much_ more averse to letting someone treat them in an 'unfair' way than they are desirous of getting free, or extra, resources.
So people will literally turn down a free lunch if it comes with an assumed loss of relative status or participation in a deal in which someone is seen to have an unfair advantage over them, even if in rational absolute terms they only gain by the exchange.
So, 'value', though seemingly abstract, is like a puncture hole though the skin into a deeply human world of social networks, personal status, testosterone levels, fear of loss, desire to impress and just a very apelike, living, human experience of reality.
Heuristics are a thing. Humans use simple, usually ratio-based intuitive shortcuts based on environmental factors in order to work out the value of thigs. When considered singly, isolated away from their ecology of thought and zoned-in on in a lab, all of these heuristics break down. They are 'non-logical' and can be made to be wrong with tricks of logic.
The question of how powerful this effect is in real-life is a primary moral axis of the book. Unusually, Economists and Humanists are on the same side in this one, they both want the decisions people make to 'make sense' and to be fundamentally rational, or at least, reasonable. Even if they break down in the lab it is hoped human decision making works 'as a whole'.
Poundstone seems to be on the other side, the general drift of his argument is that prices are deeply and worryingly ethereal and much of human value-assignment is basically a holodeck episode.
Takeaways;
Priceless absolutely abounds in factoids, little slivers and pieces of counter-intuitive, strange or just interesting discoveries and secrets. Here are a few;
There is/was a weird culture war/intellectual war between Economists and Psychologists. Economists seem to move in an ethereal realm of pure figures and absolute values on which the great machinery of their thought is based. Psychologists are a bit dirty, manipulative and fluid, they chew away at the absolute values Economists need to build their palaces, revealing them to be little more than dreams.
So in the partial history of the relations between Psychologists and Economists that makes up a strand of the book, Economists have a habit of just straight-out dismissing anything Psychologists say with "Oh, _psychology_)", at least for the start of the book. So that is an interesting example of subjects or cultures deciding to just not talk to each other. Or at least, not to listen.
..............
'Anchoring', shaping assumptions on price by opening with a super-high figure, works much much much better than most people intuit it does. It works on the average Joe, and it works on experts, it works on people who decide quickly, and it works on people who consider deeply. The depth to which you have thought about something, alone, does not meaningfully change the extent to which Anchoring will work on you.
.............
"Fisher aspired to predict prices from supply and demand. His thesis described how to do that, and Fisher went so far as to build a price-generating machine (see page 225). It was a tank of water with a flotilla of half-flooded wooden "cisterns" connected by a system of levers. Adjustments to "stoppers" and levers fed in data on incomes, marginal utilities, and supplies; then prices could be read off scales. Gibbs must have been pleased. The device prefigured, if not parodied, the direction of twentieth-century economics. ("Press stopper I and raise III," read part of Fishers instructions for the thing. "I, II, III now represent a wealthy middle class and poor man respectively...")
.............
"I absolutely thought [pay] would go down because the disclosures would be so embarrassing," recalled Graef Crystal, an architect of those disclosure rules. "But it turned out that when somebody is hauling in $200 million, he's not embarrassable."
.............
"After years of work-around like half-dozen cartons of eggs and ever-shrinking containers of milk, it bit the bullet and raised its top price to $99.99. For president Jeff Gold, it was almost like a death in the family. 'The number 99 is a magic number - deviating from that is something we absolutely are not taking lightly,' he said. 'I find significant discomfort emotionally about considering making the change.'
............
There is much much more, its something of a wunderkammer of these, more than it is a book almost.
There were layers to my response to 'Priceless'. I often found it 'clever', in a mildly frustrating way. The glib single-idea 'gotchas' of business writing or magazine articles. I intuitively strongly dislike what I perceived as a mild wash of slightly sneering superiority through the opening parts of the book.
Under that, its actually interesting. The basic deal is that price, which bills itself as a firm and near-abstract unit of measurement, is a deeply human construct. On the down side this means the world economy is largely a collective hallucination and could collapse or change hugely at any time. On the more positive (to me) side, Economics is not just a part of the Humanities, it’s actually a Romance. Piercing through the needle-dot of price reveals a cosmos of human emotion, human feeling and human social relationships, illogical, 'irrational', but making organic sense, not without reason or meaning and if not entirely within our control then at least within our capacity to understand.
June 24, 2021
[Imported automatically from my blog. Some formatting there may not have translated here.]
I'm pretty sure I heard good things about this book at some point in the recent past, which caused me to plunk it on my get-at-library list. I was slightly disappointed.
The author, William Poundstone, has a mission accurately summed up in his subtitle: prices are a shared illusion, easily manipulated by dinking with the all-too-human psychology of buyers and sellers. The book has 57 chapters, some only a couple of pages. Each purports to draw lessons from psychological studies. Poundstone is especially (and deservedly) reverent toward the groundbreaking research carried out by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky.
The main problem stems from the book's age: published in 2010. So the author is not exactly breaking fresh ground. Daniel Kahneman's own book, Thinking Fast and Slow, came out in 2011. And if you've read that ( as I have ), then you'll have already seen a lot of stuff that's discussed in Priceless.
But it's worse than just being old. Poundstone assumes that all those studies he quotes are reliable. That was a reasonable position to take in 2010, but not so much today. For example, the work on "priming": where exposure to an idea, a suggestion, an image … whatever, causes our unconscious mind to make it more likely to raise future occurrences to our mental attention. Sounds nice, plausible, … but the research that purported to demonstrate it turned out out to be irreproducible.
Since I, as a 2021 reader, knew that already, it cast a cloud over the dozens of studies Poundstone cites to bolster his thesis. I kept wondering has anyone tried reproducing this? This guy seems to think a lot of the other research in social psychology is bunk.
I'm not one to judge. (But it does help my cognitive bias a lot, I get to auto-dismiss research when I don't like the results.) So I recommend reading Poundstone's book with a lot of healthy skepticism.
But (hey) he could be right. So next time you enter into a price negotiation, try his "anchoring" strategy: be the first one to mention a price, set it "too high" if you're the seller, "too low" if you're the buyer. You won't get what you want, but what you get will be more in your favor. Allegedly.
June 29, 2013
Nonfiction, about the intersection of psychology and economics.
I was already having my doubts about this book -- it seemed awfully digressive and lacking in specifics -- but I flung it down abruptly on page 118. Here's why.
The chapter is describing a game well-known to researchers in the psychology of economics, in which one player (called the "dictator") is given a sum of money and told to divide it with another player any way he/she wants. What interests the researcher is one of two things:
- the fact that the dictator usually proposes a fairly even split rather than $9 for me and $1 for you
- the fact that the second player will often walk away if he/she deems the split unfair, even though $1 handed to you by an economics student is $1 you didn't have when you left home this morning.
Right -- I was already familiar with this game. But then I get to this:
Elizabeth Hoffman ... suspected that dictators were being generous only because someone was watching. The experimenter is often the subject's teacher, someone who would be grading him [sic] for months to come. Is it worth a few dollars to have the professor know you're a greedy bastard?
My jaw dropped. I've read all these pages without anyone mentioning that players are aware their actions are being observed by people with whom they have existing relationships?! Researchers never thought this might be significant? The author never thought this might be significant?
I'm seriously kind of disillusioned about this. Are all those beloved experiments in human behavior that I find so interesting contaminated by stupidity like this?
And of course it's not the author's fault -- he's not the one conducting and writing up the experiments without taking this into account -- but he made me read 118 pages without mentioning it, so to hell with him.
I was already having my doubts about this book -- it seemed awfully digressive and lacking in specifics -- but I flung it down abruptly on page 118. Here's why.
The chapter is describing a game well-known to researchers in the psychology of economics, in which one player (called the "dictator") is given a sum of money and told to divide it with another player any way he/she wants. What interests the researcher is one of two things:
- the fact that the dictator usually proposes a fairly even split rather than $9 for me and $1 for you
- the fact that the second player will often walk away if he/she deems the split unfair, even though $1 handed to you by an economics student is $1 you didn't have when you left home this morning.
Right -- I was already familiar with this game. But then I get to this:
Elizabeth Hoffman ... suspected that dictators were being generous only because someone was watching. The experimenter is often the subject's teacher, someone who would be grading him [sic] for months to come. Is it worth a few dollars to have the professor know you're a greedy bastard?
My jaw dropped. I've read all these pages without anyone mentioning that players are aware their actions are being observed by people with whom they have existing relationships?! Researchers never thought this might be significant? The author never thought this might be significant?
I'm seriously kind of disillusioned about this. Are all those beloved experiments in human behavior that I find so interesting contaminated by stupidity like this?
And of course it's not the author's fault -- he's not the one conducting and writing up the experiments without taking this into account -- but he made me read 118 pages without mentioning it, so to hell with him.
June 9, 2012
Priceless opened a whole new world to me, a world that was always right in front of my eyes. Behavioral study fields always have fascinating tales. Tales about our own behaviour that defy logic and tell us something weird about ourselves. But most books on the subject fail to go past the tagging of these phenomenon and mocking at our own irrationality. They spend inordinate time going after the classical theories. This is where Priceless has something different to offer.
To be sure, the well-written book has the usual things one gets in other books: the name-dropping, jargonizing, experiments that reveal the counter-intuitive aspects of our behaviour etc. This all is interesting, important and entertaining. But, where the book really adds value is in connecting them with real life situation, and offering some unambiguous advises in dealing with real life situations.
For instance, the author makes a remarkable point when he discusses the importance of stating the first number in a negotiation situation - quite opposite of what most of us like to do. The revelations on the display items in a luxury store (that are never intended for actual sale but to create the illusion of value for other items) are useful for any compulsive shoppers. Even the usual topics like anchoring and prospect theory are attached to practical examples.
A book to be read multiple times over time to really imbibe all its important messages.
To be sure, the well-written book has the usual things one gets in other books: the name-dropping, jargonizing, experiments that reveal the counter-intuitive aspects of our behaviour etc. This all is interesting, important and entertaining. But, where the book really adds value is in connecting them with real life situation, and offering some unambiguous advises in dealing with real life situations.
For instance, the author makes a remarkable point when he discusses the importance of stating the first number in a negotiation situation - quite opposite of what most of us like to do. The revelations on the display items in a luxury store (that are never intended for actual sale but to create the illusion of value for other items) are useful for any compulsive shoppers. Even the usual topics like anchoring and prospect theory are attached to practical examples.
A book to be read multiple times over time to really imbibe all its important messages.
January 10, 2017
I'm not going to doubt whether this author has thoroughly researched his content or unraveled groundbreaking insights revealed in the book. But none of this can mask his poor writing style or the way this book has been structured.
I really tried making it to the end but gave up half way through the book, realising I wasn't enjoying it at all. I didn't buy this book to learn about the life of economists researching monetary values. I wanted to learn about how people value money. I have never come across such a terrible structure for presenting case studies or stories behind research. The author gives no hint or motivation to why as I reader I should soldier through paragraphs of irrelevant information for the treasure of knowledge at the end nor does he deliver even breadcrumbs of insights to keep me moving forward. This felt like a research paper filled with obituaries of economists in book form.
I really tried making it to the end but gave up half way through the book, realising I wasn't enjoying it at all. I didn't buy this book to learn about the life of economists researching monetary values. I wanted to learn about how people value money. I have never come across such a terrible structure for presenting case studies or stories behind research. The author gives no hint or motivation to why as I reader I should soldier through paragraphs of irrelevant information for the treasure of knowledge at the end nor does he deliver even breadcrumbs of insights to keep me moving forward. This felt like a research paper filled with obituaries of economists in book form.
May 1, 2015
I remembered William Poundstone from the Big Secrets era. So when a goodreads friend mentioned this book, I thought I'd check it out.
It was both maddening and interesting. Basically, prices are meaningless; supply and demand is irrelevant to cost; and your cell phone bill is complicated on purpose. That's not much of an enticement to read it, but it discusses economic and neuroscience research in short, digestible bites. (With depressing results, but you probably already knew something was amiss, didn't you?) Of course, I was depressed, but when I told a normally-chill coworker with an MBA that prices were meaningless, he got actually angry. So that was interesting...
It was both maddening and interesting. Basically, prices are meaningless; supply and demand is irrelevant to cost; and your cell phone bill is complicated on purpose. That's not much of an enticement to read it, but it discusses economic and neuroscience research in short, digestible bites. (With depressing results, but you probably already knew something was amiss, didn't you?) Of course, I was depressed, but when I told a normally-chill coworker with an MBA that prices were meaningless, he got actually angry. So that was interesting...
March 9, 2025
Two parts too long IMO. And what’s this obsession with research and research alone in non fiction these days?
I had to ask myself many times whose book am I reading because, William, your perspective (dare I say expertise) was missing. Using others research, quotes, and references can only take you so far. The use cases and examples can help a person understand how value and price are two different things especially depending who and how you ask but what does it mean at the end of the day aside from consumers aka PEOPLE continuing to just tap their cards because ultimately who’s responsible for it all - companies.
In all honesty I skimmed the second half of this book because it was alright and I held out hope for it to get better. I’d suggest people to read the first part and that’s enough to know.
Happy reading (or not)
I had to ask myself many times whose book am I reading because, William, your perspective (dare I say expertise) was missing. Using others research, quotes, and references can only take you so far. The use cases and examples can help a person understand how value and price are two different things especially depending who and how you ask but what does it mean at the end of the day aside from consumers aka PEOPLE continuing to just tap their cards because ultimately who’s responsible for it all - companies.
In all honesty I skimmed the second half of this book because it was alright and I held out hope for it to get better. I’d suggest people to read the first part and that’s enough to know.
Happy reading (or not)
June 12, 2010
We are primates. Not homo economicus, as we pretend to be.
This is not a text book, more of an entertaining book spinning stories how marketers, scientists and companies exploit our weak mind each and every day. We're so easily fooled, it's mind-numbing.
We all have our biases and prejudices in all areas of life, and PRICELESS helps to explain how and why we may feel in a certain way about the price of Gucci bag, a pair of Jimmy Choos, and etc. The evidence provided is primarily anecdotal and not meant to be an all encompassing erudite study in economics. If you want to read a very entertaining book on how many large marketers decide to set what they consider to be their optimal prices for their various products then add this book to your reading list.
This is not a text book, more of an entertaining book spinning stories how marketers, scientists and companies exploit our weak mind each and every day. We're so easily fooled, it's mind-numbing.
We all have our biases and prejudices in all areas of life, and PRICELESS helps to explain how and why we may feel in a certain way about the price of Gucci bag, a pair of Jimmy Choos, and etc. The evidence provided is primarily anecdotal and not meant to be an all encompassing erudite study in economics. If you want to read a very entertaining book on how many large marketers decide to set what they consider to be their optimal prices for their various products then add this book to your reading list.
September 9, 2011
A look at the psychology of how people perceive product prices. Some interesting tidbits: for example, that cereal manufacturers raise their prices by changing the size of the box and/or the amount of empty space inside; and after a trend of increasing or decreasing size has gone on for a while, then offering a new "value size" or "mini size" that returns to the original dimensions, but with a seeming justification for the price change.
But overall, it spent a lot of time on studies and ideas that I was already familiar with (for example, anchoring) and personal profiles of the economists or psychologists involved in developing them, so I didn't find it very rewarding.
Stopped on page 86 of 336.
But overall, it spent a lot of time on studies and ideas that I was already familiar with (for example, anchoring) and personal profiles of the economists or psychologists involved in developing them, so I didn't find it very rewarding.
Stopped on page 86 of 336.
August 25, 2025
Những đòn tâm lý trong định giá sản phẩm by William Poundstone
Giới thiệu nội dung
Những Đòn Tâm Lý Trong Định Giá Sản Phẩm là sự tóm tắt của rất nhiều kết quả nghiên cứu kinh tế học hành vi nhằm giúp độc giả khám phá ra chân tướng đằng sau những chiêu thức hấp dẫn của các chiến dịch marketing được thực hiện nhằm đem đến nhiều lợi nhuận hơn cho nhãn hàng.
William là nhà văn, nhà báo người Mỹ, tác giả của nhiều cuốn sách phi hư cấu, bao gồm Những Đòn Tâm Lý Trong Định Giá Sản Phẩm, Head In The Cloud, Are You Smart Enough To Work At Google?...
Tổng quan
Bạn có nhớ lần gần nhất bạn đi mua một món đồ nhưng ngay sau đó đã có suy nghĩ "mình vừa mới phung phí tiền bạc" là lúc nào không?
Thực tế là, chúng ta hay có cảm giác không thể ước tính giá "công bằng" một cách chính xác. Vì vậy, ta thường để những yếu tố ngoại biên định giá giúp. Từ sự vô thức, tính phi lý đến cả yếu tố chính trị, tất cả đều tác động mạnh mẽ đến hành vi định giá.
Bạn có thể không tin nhưng số tiền bạn chi cho bữa tối nay hoàn toàn có thể bị chi phối bởi một con số mà bạn nghe trên tin tức buổi sáng! Nghe có vẻ điên rồ, nhưng những ý tưởng này đã được các thí nghiệm tâm lý chứng minh và được minh họa sống động bằng một loạt ví dụ điển hình trong quyển sách Những Đòn Tâm Lý Trong Định Giá Sản Phẩm. Cuốn sách sẵn sàng vạch trần những "cạm bẫy" marketing mà các công ty hay sử dụng để thuyết phục người tiêu dùng tự nguyện trả nhiều hơn so với nhu cầu thực tế của họ. Khi định giá, các bạn cần sự trợ giúp. Vậy thì hãy để tác giả William Poundstone và quyển sách này giúp bạn một tay nhé!
Nội dung thứ nhất: Một mức giá và vô vàn cảm xúc.
Nếu tìm thấy một tờ tiền mệnh giá 20 đô-la thì liệu bạn có hạnh phúc gấp đôi so với việc nhặt được tờ 10 đô-la? Có thể có, hoặc cũng có thể không. Vì số tiền nhân đôi không phải lúc nào cũng khiến bạn hạnh phúc gấp đôi, mà điều đó hoàn toàn phụ thuộc vào sự an toàn tài chính của mỗi người.
Nếu bạn có tài chính ổn định thì 10 đô-la chỉ là những đồng bạc lẻ so với số tài sản bạn có. Hiện tượng này được gọi là "hiệu ứng của cải"
Để dễ hiểu, bạn có thể hình dung, một triệu phú sẽ chẳng bị thu hút bởi 1.000 đô-la, nhưng đối với một người rỗng túi, tờ 100 đô-la sẽ giống như một phép màu. Các thí nghiệm mà tác giả đưa ra chứng minh rằng, bạn sẽ có những phản ứng mạnh mẽ hơn khi số tiền mà bạn mất đi hay kiếm được có tác động lớn đến tình hình tài chính của bạn.
Nội dung thứ 2: Định giá và những yếu tố tác động.
Khả năng trúng số độc đắc gần như bằng O nhưng hằng ngày vẫn có hàng triệu người thử
vận may của mình. Bạn đã bao giờ tự hỏi vì sao họ lại làm vậy chưa? Do không đủ dữ liệu và thời gian nghiên cứu, chúng ta thường đưa ra quyết định dựa trên phương pháp phỏng đoán. Đây là lối tắt tinh thần mà bộ não của chúng ta sử dụng để đưa ra những quyết định nhanh chóng dựa trên những kinh nghiệm đã có.
Các nhà tâm lý học đã làm các thí nghiệm với người chơi cờ bạc. Thay vì chọn những canh bạc có giá trị trung bình cao nhất, người chơi chỉ tính đến các yếu tố cơ bản khi đưa ra quyết định, chẳng hạn như tìm kiếm lợi nhuận cao nhất, hoặc hành động theo trực giác của họ. Khi người khác tạo áp lực trong lúc chúng ta cần đưa ra quyết định, thông thường ta sẽ tin theo trực giác của mình. Nhưng nếu trực giác của ta cũng bị ảnh hưởng thì sao?
Dành cho những ai chưa biết thì hormone oxytocin chính là nhân tố thúc đẩy sự hình thành của niềm tin và sự hào phóng. Khi được tạo ra trong quá trình sinh nở và cho con bú, nó thiết lập một mối liên kết tình cảm mạnh mẽ. Còn khi bán hàng, mọi nhân viên đều thích những vị khách hàng thể hiện sự hào phóng. Liquid Trust là sản phẩm được phát minh dựa trên lý do đó. Đây là một chất xịt có chứa oxytocin để sử dụng trong nước hoa và thiệp chúc mừng. Các nhà khoa học thì khẳng định oxytocin chỉ hiệu nghiệm khi được tiêm vào cơ thể hoặc phun trực tiếp vào mũi, nên Liquid Trust có thể không thực sự có tác dụng, nhưng những quyết định xuất phát từ thâm tâm bạn lại thuyết phục bạn nhiều hơn bạn nghĩ!
Nội dung thứ 3: Quyền năng của những "mỏ neo".
Bạn có nhớ nhiệt độ ngày hôm nay ở nơi bạn sống là bao nhiêu không? Không ư, vậy bạn sẽ ngạc nhiên khi biết con số đó lại có thể tác động đến lần mua hàng tiếp theo của bạn.
Khi phải ước lượng giá cả hay con số mà không dựa trên một hệ đánh giá quy chuẩn nào, chúng ta sẽ dựa vào những gợi ý đến từ môi trường xung quanh. Chúng được gọi là "mỏ neo". Theo cách này, ngay cả những con số không đáng kể nhất cũng có thể tạo ảnh hưởng đến quyết định tiếp theo của chúng ta theo cách ta không thể ngờ tới. Và bất kỳ ai bị ảnh hưởng bởi một "mỏ neo" cao hơn sẽ có ước tính cao hơn.
Trong một thí nghiệm, người tham gia được phát bảng câu hỏi có dán nhiều tờ ghi chú với những con số được ghi bằng bút màu ở mặt sau. Một số người tham gia sẽ được yêu cầu ghi lại con số đó vào bảng câu hỏi. Số khác chỉ cần ghi ra màu mực của con số đó. Sau đó, những người này được yêu cầu ước tính xem có bao nhiêu số điện thoại của bác sĩ được ghi chép trong cuốn danh bạ. Với nhóm người đã cẩn thận sao chép các con số ra bảng câu hỏi, họ đã dự đoán một con số cao hơn khoảng 55% so với con số của nhóm chỉ cần viết ra màu mực.
Nhưng điều gì sẽ xảy ra khi chúng ta biết đến sự hiện diện của "mỏ neo" và cố tình sử dụng nó làm điểm tham chiếu? Nếu vậy thì hành vi của ta sẽ bị ảnh hưởng lớn hơn. Một thí nghiệm khác yêu cầu người tham gia ước lượng khối lượng của vật thứ hai sau khi cảm nhận trọng lượng của vật thứ nhất. Ở đây, vật thứ nhất chính là "mỏ neo". Khi trọng lượng của "mỏ neo" nhẹ hơn, vật thứ hai có thể được dự đoán là nặng hơn so với giá trị thực tế của nó.
Khi một con số càng được chú ý thì nó càng gây ra nhiều ảnh hưởng. Chỉ cần xem xét trường hợp bạn so sánh trực tiếp hai mức giá của sản phẩm. Nếu giá "mỏ neo" của những sản phẩm xung quanh càng cao thì số tiền bạn sẵn sàng chi trả sẽ càng nhiều.
Với công trình này, tác giá William Poundstone đã tiết lộ yếu tố tâm lý ẩn giấu đằng sau quá trình định giá sản phẩm dựa trên giá trị. Đi từ khái niệm quan trọng đến một loạt thí nghiệm và tình huống hấp dẫn, quyển sách không chỉ kích thích sự tò mò của độc giả về sự ảnh hưởng mạnh mẽ của yếu tố tâm lý trong định giá sản phẩm mà còn khiến chúng ta vỡ lẽ được nhiều kiến thức về chiến lược kinh doanh - tiêu dùng, để từ đó chúng ta có thể kiểm soát mình tốt hơn trong chi tiêu hằng ngày.
18.08.2025
N
Giới thiệu nội dung
Những Đòn Tâm Lý Trong Định Giá Sản Phẩm là sự tóm tắt của rất nhiều kết quả nghiên cứu kinh tế học hành vi nhằm giúp độc giả khám phá ra chân tướng đằng sau những chiêu thức hấp dẫn của các chiến dịch marketing được thực hiện nhằm đem đến nhiều lợi nhuận hơn cho nhãn hàng.
William là nhà văn, nhà báo người Mỹ, tác giả của nhiều cuốn sách phi hư cấu, bao gồm Những Đòn Tâm Lý Trong Định Giá Sản Phẩm, Head In The Cloud, Are You Smart Enough To Work At Google?...
Tổng quan
Bạn có nhớ lần gần nhất bạn đi mua một món đồ nhưng ngay sau đó đã có suy nghĩ "mình vừa mới phung phí tiền bạc" là lúc nào không?
Thực tế là, chúng ta hay có cảm giác không thể ước tính giá "công bằng" một cách chính xác. Vì vậy, ta thường để những yếu tố ngoại biên định giá giúp. Từ sự vô thức, tính phi lý đến cả yếu tố chính trị, tất cả đều tác động mạnh mẽ đến hành vi định giá.
Bạn có thể không tin nhưng số tiền bạn chi cho bữa tối nay hoàn toàn có thể bị chi phối bởi một con số mà bạn nghe trên tin tức buổi sáng! Nghe có vẻ điên rồ, nhưng những ý tưởng này đã được các thí nghiệm tâm lý chứng minh và được minh họa sống động bằng một loạt ví dụ điển hình trong quyển sách Những Đòn Tâm Lý Trong Định Giá Sản Phẩm. Cuốn sách sẵn sàng vạch trần những "cạm bẫy" marketing mà các công ty hay sử dụng để thuyết phục người tiêu dùng tự nguyện trả nhiều hơn so với nhu cầu thực tế của họ. Khi định giá, các bạn cần sự trợ giúp. Vậy thì hãy để tác giả William Poundstone và quyển sách này giúp bạn một tay nhé!
Nội dung thứ nhất: Một mức giá và vô vàn cảm xúc.
Nếu tìm thấy một tờ tiền mệnh giá 20 đô-la thì liệu bạn có hạnh phúc gấp đôi so với việc nhặt được tờ 10 đô-la? Có thể có, hoặc cũng có thể không. Vì số tiền nhân đôi không phải lúc nào cũng khiến bạn hạnh phúc gấp đôi, mà điều đó hoàn toàn phụ thuộc vào sự an toàn tài chính của mỗi người.
Nếu bạn có tài chính ổn định thì 10 đô-la chỉ là những đồng bạc lẻ so với số tài sản bạn có. Hiện tượng này được gọi là "hiệu ứng của cải"
Để dễ hiểu, bạn có thể hình dung, một triệu phú sẽ chẳng bị thu hút bởi 1.000 đô-la, nhưng đối với một người rỗng túi, tờ 100 đô-la sẽ giống như một phép màu. Các thí nghiệm mà tác giả đưa ra chứng minh rằng, bạn sẽ có những phản ứng mạnh mẽ hơn khi số tiền mà bạn mất đi hay kiếm được có tác động lớn đến tình hình tài chính của bạn.
Nội dung thứ 2: Định giá và những yếu tố tác động.
Khả năng trúng số độc đắc gần như bằng O nhưng hằng ngày vẫn có hàng triệu người thử
vận may của mình. Bạn đã bao giờ tự hỏi vì sao họ lại làm vậy chưa? Do không đủ dữ liệu và thời gian nghiên cứu, chúng ta thường đưa ra quyết định dựa trên phương pháp phỏng đoán. Đây là lối tắt tinh thần mà bộ não của chúng ta sử dụng để đưa ra những quyết định nhanh chóng dựa trên những kinh nghiệm đã có.
Các nhà tâm lý học đã làm các thí nghiệm với người chơi cờ bạc. Thay vì chọn những canh bạc có giá trị trung bình cao nhất, người chơi chỉ tính đến các yếu tố cơ bản khi đưa ra quyết định, chẳng hạn như tìm kiếm lợi nhuận cao nhất, hoặc hành động theo trực giác của họ. Khi người khác tạo áp lực trong lúc chúng ta cần đưa ra quyết định, thông thường ta sẽ tin theo trực giác của mình. Nhưng nếu trực giác của ta cũng bị ảnh hưởng thì sao?
Dành cho những ai chưa biết thì hormone oxytocin chính là nhân tố thúc đẩy sự hình thành của niềm tin và sự hào phóng. Khi được tạo ra trong quá trình sinh nở và cho con bú, nó thiết lập một mối liên kết tình cảm mạnh mẽ. Còn khi bán hàng, mọi nhân viên đều thích những vị khách hàng thể hiện sự hào phóng. Liquid Trust là sản phẩm được phát minh dựa trên lý do đó. Đây là một chất xịt có chứa oxytocin để sử dụng trong nước hoa và thiệp chúc mừng. Các nhà khoa học thì khẳng định oxytocin chỉ hiệu nghiệm khi được tiêm vào cơ thể hoặc phun trực tiếp vào mũi, nên Liquid Trust có thể không thực sự có tác dụng, nhưng những quyết định xuất phát từ thâm tâm bạn lại thuyết phục bạn nhiều hơn bạn nghĩ!
Nội dung thứ 3: Quyền năng của những "mỏ neo".
Bạn có nhớ nhiệt độ ngày hôm nay ở nơi bạn sống là bao nhiêu không? Không ư, vậy bạn sẽ ngạc nhiên khi biết con số đó lại có thể tác động đến lần mua hàng tiếp theo của bạn.
Khi phải ước lượng giá cả hay con số mà không dựa trên một hệ đánh giá quy chuẩn nào, chúng ta sẽ dựa vào những gợi ý đến từ môi trường xung quanh. Chúng được gọi là "mỏ neo". Theo cách này, ngay cả những con số không đáng kể nhất cũng có thể tạo ảnh hưởng đến quyết định tiếp theo của chúng ta theo cách ta không thể ngờ tới. Và bất kỳ ai bị ảnh hưởng bởi một "mỏ neo" cao hơn sẽ có ước tính cao hơn.
Trong một thí nghiệm, người tham gia được phát bảng câu hỏi có dán nhiều tờ ghi chú với những con số được ghi bằng bút màu ở mặt sau. Một số người tham gia sẽ được yêu cầu ghi lại con số đó vào bảng câu hỏi. Số khác chỉ cần ghi ra màu mực của con số đó. Sau đó, những người này được yêu cầu ước tính xem có bao nhiêu số điện thoại của bác sĩ được ghi chép trong cuốn danh bạ. Với nhóm người đã cẩn thận sao chép các con số ra bảng câu hỏi, họ đã dự đoán một con số cao hơn khoảng 55% so với con số của nhóm chỉ cần viết ra màu mực.
Nhưng điều gì sẽ xảy ra khi chúng ta biết đến sự hiện diện của "mỏ neo" và cố tình sử dụng nó làm điểm tham chiếu? Nếu vậy thì hành vi của ta sẽ bị ảnh hưởng lớn hơn. Một thí nghiệm khác yêu cầu người tham gia ước lượng khối lượng của vật thứ hai sau khi cảm nhận trọng lượng của vật thứ nhất. Ở đây, vật thứ nhất chính là "mỏ neo". Khi trọng lượng của "mỏ neo" nhẹ hơn, vật thứ hai có thể được dự đoán là nặng hơn so với giá trị thực tế của nó.
Khi một con số càng được chú ý thì nó càng gây ra nhiều ảnh hưởng. Chỉ cần xem xét trường hợp bạn so sánh trực tiếp hai mức giá của sản phẩm. Nếu giá "mỏ neo" của những sản phẩm xung quanh càng cao thì số tiền bạn sẵn sàng chi trả sẽ càng nhiều.
Với công trình này, tác giá William Poundstone đã tiết lộ yếu tố tâm lý ẩn giấu đằng sau quá trình định giá sản phẩm dựa trên giá trị. Đi từ khái niệm quan trọng đến một loạt thí nghiệm và tình huống hấp dẫn, quyển sách không chỉ kích thích sự tò mò của độc giả về sự ảnh hưởng mạnh mẽ của yếu tố tâm lý trong định giá sản phẩm mà còn khiến chúng ta vỡ lẽ được nhiều kiến thức về chiến lược kinh doanh - tiêu dùng, để từ đó chúng ta có thể kiểm soát mình tốt hơn trong chi tiêu hằng ngày.
18.08.2025
N
July 24, 2011
Excellent summary of a ton of behavioral economics findings. Probably the best book in this vein that I've read, in part because Poundstone doesn't write like he has anything personal at stake--he's just sharing all this interesting info. In part because Poundstone's examples (almost every chapter opens with an anecdote or a portrait of an interesting figure) are so damn good.
The first half of the book lays out a few crucial concepts--anchoring, price coherence, etc., and the second spells these out through a series of fascinating experiments and situations.
Must read for anyone studying pricing or in business school or at all interested in decision making . . .
The first half of the book lays out a few crucial concepts--anchoring, price coherence, etc., and the second spells these out through a series of fascinating experiments and situations.
Must read for anyone studying pricing or in business school or at all interested in decision making . . .
February 22, 2016
'Priceless' is neither an extensive theory of value perception nor even a marketers' guide to 'right' pricing but it's still a great book. It starts with a review of history of modern behavioral economics and then goes into recent studies of price perceptions. That in turn leads us to notion of multidimensional, culturally and personally conditioned price perceptions. That would definitely challenge your common sense view of how money and mind collaborate.
Especially recommended for D.Kahneman fans.
Especially recommended for D.Kahneman fans.
July 20, 2011
Couldn't get too into this one. I wish it hadn't been written as 40-odd short chapters and more of a continuous narrative. I also wish I had a unicorn.
July 15, 2011
The book has a few interesting stories about the results of psychology experiments,
but it's about 6 times longer than it needs to be.
It could have used a good editor.
but it's about 6 times longer than it needs to be.
It could have used a good editor.
December 26, 2019
Overall, was unamused and slightly bored by the book. Mislead by the tag-line and reviews. Didn't find much value in reading it and would not recommend. It's redemption lies in its wealth of examples of the mental quirks that could be exploited by marketers, but it lacks overarching structure or principles that could be utilized by aspiring marketers or now knowledgeable consumers looking to defend themselves. Other books also do a better job of speaking of these psychological and behavioral flaws.
The book is lacks any coherent point, structure, or thesis. It is a bombardment of examples ad nauseum of a few simple points. Do we need more proof that a single chapter to capture all the lessons this book has to offer? Perhaps, the various examples are interesting or at least memorable enough to be useful. But it is some combination of annoying, boring, and pointless to hear about different variations of the ultimatum game in so many of the chapters.
A review by Daniel Kahneman calls the book "Instructive and entertaining. It will leave you amused, smarter, and wondering what money and prices really mean." Perhaps this is an example of two economists scratching each others back [Poundstone speaks highly of Kahneman in the book and perhaps they are friends] But the review was highly misleading. This book did not leave me amused, smarter, more knowledgeable or curious about the nature of money and prices. The dive into behavioral experiments was to shallow to dig into the deeper questions, but by no means is easily digestible for a layman's audience.
The tag-line of this book "Discover the hidden secrets of pricing and how to use them to your advantage". Perhaps this book did indeed, reveal some quirky marketing tricks that retailers use to trick consumers. But, it doesn't really act as a guide to those hoping to 'use them to your advantage' or really explain how consumers could protect themselves. In that way, the book ends up being highly unactionable and lacks significant to most potential readers.
The book is lacks any coherent point, structure, or thesis. It is a bombardment of examples ad nauseum of a few simple points. Do we need more proof that a single chapter to capture all the lessons this book has to offer? Perhaps, the various examples are interesting or at least memorable enough to be useful. But it is some combination of annoying, boring, and pointless to hear about different variations of the ultimatum game in so many of the chapters.
A review by Daniel Kahneman calls the book "Instructive and entertaining. It will leave you amused, smarter, and wondering what money and prices really mean." Perhaps this is an example of two economists scratching each others back [Poundstone speaks highly of Kahneman in the book and perhaps they are friends] But the review was highly misleading. This book did not leave me amused, smarter, more knowledgeable or curious about the nature of money and prices. The dive into behavioral experiments was to shallow to dig into the deeper questions, but by no means is easily digestible for a layman's audience.
The tag-line of this book "Discover the hidden secrets of pricing and how to use them to your advantage". Perhaps this book did indeed, reveal some quirky marketing tricks that retailers use to trick consumers. But, it doesn't really act as a guide to those hoping to 'use them to your advantage' or really explain how consumers could protect themselves. In that way, the book ends up being highly unactionable and lacks significant to most potential readers.
March 18, 2025
Зустрічав схожі думки і погляди в інших книгах але ця теж непогага. Якщо узагальнювати то автор детально розказує про "якори" а саме ціни на деякі товари відносно інших які перетягують увагу або ж це стартова сума від якої сперечаються продавець і покупець. До прикладу якщо в магазині є сумочка за 1000 баксів і на ній акцентована увага , то інші товари вже не здаватимуться такими дорогими навіть якщо поставити ціну на футболку 200 доларів а на брелок з цим брендом 100. Все сприймається відносно . От і автор наводить купу прикладів торгів коли стартова ціна нерухомості чи іншого товару збиває з пантелику навіть експертів. Так вони не дадуть 150 тисяч за вашу квартиру але оцінять її в умовних 130,і вам це підходить. І це в тих випадках коли вони всерівно змушені знизити її вартість але правило : Чим більше просиш тим більше отримаєш працює у більшості випадків. Воно не ефективне лише у захмарних оцінках. Якщо ви просите за свій товар мільйон а його ціна максимум 100 тисяч то на такі забаганки правило не діє. Проте навіть тут бувають винятки. В книзі є приклад коли маєток Енді Ворхола продавали за 50 мільйонів лише за той факт що там мешкав митець. Купляв він його за 250 тисяч отже ціна продажу здається неадекватною. Проте декілька років очікувань і тривалі торги змогли все ж дійти до згоди продати його за 25-30 лямів.
Також багато автор присвячує цінам що закінчуються на 9, або ж на 95-99.
Це ніби магія коли ми бачимо щось за ціною 19.99 то наш мозок реагую відносно одиниці, наче ми витрачаємо 10 і ще там щось. Ми не здатні оцінити що з 20 нам не залишиться нічого, але наша природа мозку не сприймає цього заокруглення.
Якщо згадати ще цікаві факти щ книги то автор часто посилається на Дена Аріелі книга якого мені дуже сподобалась і була корисною.
Можливо вони колеги і просто поділяють думки , а може цей автор підкріпив свою книгу фактами з прочитаного в Аріелі, і вона стала ціннішою)
Також багато автор присвячує цінам що закінчуються на 9, або ж на 95-99.
Це ніби магія коли ми бачимо щось за ціною 19.99 то наш мозок реагую відносно одиниці, наче ми витрачаємо 10 і ще там щось. Ми не здатні оцінити що з 20 нам не залишиться нічого, але наша природа мозку не сприймає цього заокруглення.
Якщо згадати ще цікаві факти щ книги то автор часто посилається на Дена Аріелі книга якого мені дуже сподобалась і була корисною.
Можливо вони колеги і просто поділяють думки , а може цей автор підкріпив свою книгу фактами з прочитаного в Аріелі, і вона стала ціннішою)
April 3, 2022
In the first few chapters I was thinking that it should belong a a shelf titled "Books which repeat what Daniel Kahneman said in the previous decades. It's a lot of quoting his findings, experiments and more so for the 100th time you get to hear about ultimatum game and anchoring. Described experiments were interesting but not always convincing. I can't help it but expect that people would split and refuse/accept $10 and $10M in quite a different way, but only one of these is tested experimentally for obvious reasons.
Later when the author interprets the results, the book picks up and becomes interesting. There are some interesting thoughts there, especially if you haven't read much about psychology of pricing in general. Key takeaway is that no one knows, and there's no correct answer to setting a price of something. There's a bunch of tricks however to be used to nudge it one way or the other; if you're not going to use them it's still worthwhile to know the tricks since they're everywhere. It's at its best when it's giving practical examples, such as explaining the restaurant's menu layout, why items are priced the way they are, whey they expect you to look, how it helps to brings up "on the other hand" argument when you feel price is being anchored unfavourably and more. Overall pretty solid, worth it even if the one idea that sticks is how the prices are a mass hallucination and relative values matter way more.
Later when the author interprets the results, the book picks up and becomes interesting. There are some interesting thoughts there, especially if you haven't read much about psychology of pricing in general. Key takeaway is that no one knows, and there's no correct answer to setting a price of something. There's a bunch of tricks however to be used to nudge it one way or the other; if you're not going to use them it's still worthwhile to know the tricks since they're everywhere. It's at its best when it's giving practical examples, such as explaining the restaurant's menu layout, why items are priced the way they are, whey they expect you to look, how it helps to brings up "on the other hand" argument when you feel price is being anchored unfavourably and more. Overall pretty solid, worth it even if the one idea that sticks is how the prices are a mass hallucination and relative values matter way more.
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