Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (and How to Take Advantage of It)
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.80 (550 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 080909469X |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 352 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2013-10-08 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
Prada stores carry a few obscenely expensive items in order to boost sales for everything else (which look like bargains in comparison). In psychological experiments, people are unable to estimate “fair” prices accurately and are strongly influenced by the unconscious, irrational, and politically incorrect. How? By charging 99 cents. 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. Rooted in the emerging field of behavioral decision theory,
Priceless lessons in pricing I ordered this book after a good review in the Wall Street Journal.From the title it sounds like a fairly dry book on pricing theories for a professional marketing audience.In reality it is a very entertaining, well researched book about how prices are set from all kinds of businesses, how consumers react to them - and why.Having worked in marketing and as an entrepreneur for 20 years, I have come across some of the stories quoted in the book already. However, I was not aware, that a German professor (Hermann Simon) runs the biggest pricing consulting firm in t. Pretty good, though not quite what I expected Michele I bought this book after hearing the author interviewed on NPR. In the brief two-minute (or thereabouts) interview the author mentioned some factoids that sounded fascinating and whetted my appetite for more.Now having read the book, I have to say that, although I learned things about the human mind I never knew before, I was disappointed in how dry the book was overall. The first half was devoted to the history of psychophysics, and numerous experiments conducted over the last hundred or so years. These experiments have served to establish just how quirky, irr. Fun-to-read, entertaining, educational, topical rbnn There is an intriguing irony (if not synchronicity) to my purchase of this book.The story is, I had been trying to buy this book for a few weeks from Amazon.But I couldn't (without incurring shipping fees), because Amazon had delisted the hardcover book from their catalog. Why would Amazon refuse to sell a new book by a prominent author? Well, ostensibly it was "retaliation" for the book publisher's (Macmillan's) request that Amazon charge higher prices for Kindle books published by Macmillan. Leaving aside the question of why users without a Kindle should have
Grocery shopping will never seem so simple again when one realizes how much work goes into assigning a price to a box of cereal. Nevertheless, the scope of the analysis—its attention to economic abstractions as well as real-world consequences—braids together theory and practice to leave an indelible impression on the reader. (Jan.)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. . The idea of anchoring and adjustment—setting an arbitrary number to subconsciously drive higher or lower estimates—is just one of many research areas explained at length. From Publishers Weekly Poundstone (Gaming the Vote) dives into the latest psychological findings to investigate how and why prices