Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (and How to Take Advantage of It) [Hardcover]

William Poundstone (Author)

Book Description

Release date: January 5, 2010

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Poundstone (Gaming the Vote) dives into the latest psychological findings to investigate how and why prices are allocated. Beginning with the controversial lawsuit in which a jury awarded $2.9 million in damages to a woman who had spilled a scalding cup of McDonald's coffee on herself, the author presents a readable history of how we are subtly manipulated into paying more (or less) for goods and services—and the research that attempts to explain our baffling and irrational susceptibility to pricing. 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. While Poundstone's case studies are vivid, the abundance of theories and experiments might prove overwhelming for the casual reader. 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. Grocery shopping will never seem so simple again when one realizes how much work goes into assigning a price to a box of cereal. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Poundstone, author and columnist, reviews innovative work in psychology called behavioral decision theory, or the study of how people make decisions. We learn how people estimate numbers, the process of making wild guesses, jotting down offers and counteroffers, and rating anything on a scale of 1 to 10. Extensive research on pricing strategies has been conducted, and marketers have learned what people will pay is changeable and consumers can be manipulated. The book cites numerous experiments, including how juries award damages in court; reserve price research, or the maximum a buyer will pay; the way smart people are influenced by mere words and by the way choices are framed; sale prices are more powerful motivators than charm prices (those slightly below a round number); and money and chocolate are the most popular motivators in behavioral decision experiments. This collection of experiments and related findings is essentially an academic work for a variety of students. --Mary Whaley

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Hill and Wang; First Edition edition (January 5, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 080909469X
• ISBN-13: 978-0809094691
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.4 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (42 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #89,615 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #79 in Books > Business & Investing > Industries & Professions > Retailing
  • #79 in Books > Business & Investing > Economics > Microeconomics

More About the Author

William Poundstone is the author of two previous Hill and Wang books: Fortune's Formula and Gaming the Vote.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

81 of 86 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Priceless lessons in pricing January 10, 2010

By Oliver Fritsch

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

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 the world, that restaurant menus are better designed without leading dots before the price (otherwise they guide the eye to the lowest priced item) or that supermarkets yield a $2 higher average shopping cart revenue if the path through the market goes counterclockwise instead of clockwise.

It will take some work to extract pricing lessons for your own business (you actually have to READ the book first!) but it is pleasant enough!

Oliver Fritsch
Cendesic Marketing

94 of 102 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Pretty good, though not quite what I expected January 25, 2010

By Michele

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

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, irrational and suggestible the human mind is with regards to numbers, and pretty much debunk the established notion among economists that humans behave rationally when it comes to numbers, always making decisions that will best benefit themselves (the mythical Homo Economicus). Although these experiments were all new and surprising to me, reading about them felt like reading a college textbook. Not exactly my idea of pleasure reading!!

Just about exactly halfway through the book, Poundstone gets more interesting. This is when he starts citing real-world examples of how savvy businesses take advantage of the mind's susceptibility to numbers (often using the service of "price consultants"), all with the intent of getting clueless customers to part with more of their hard-earned money. This part of the book was truly fascinating, as he talked about how super-pricey designer boutiques arrange merchandise in their stores, how restaurants design their menus, and how new and unknown artists price their work to gain attention.

Alas, this part of the book was all too short, as Poundstone soon lapsed again into talking about more experiments....

I did learn some intriguing things about how my own mind works. I had previously thought I was impervious to the influence of advertisers and marketers. Alas, I now realize that when it comes to the murky, arbitrary realm of prices, my brain is as suggestible as anyone else's.

My conclusion: the fascinating factoids mentioned in the two-minute NPR interview were THE entire interesting part of the book -- the rest of it is somewhat tedious and academic. I was pleased with the book overall and would recommend it, albeit only to someone else who is pretty nerdish and interested in this kind of thing. This book is definitely not for everyone. Read more ›

71 of 79 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Fun-to-read, entertaining, educational, topical February 12, 2010

By rbnn

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

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 their ordinary book access restricted because of a pricing dispute over a product they do not want, the imbroglio raises two salient issues about pricing:

(1) Why is $9.99 (what Amazon wanted to charge) the "right" price for a Kindle e-book? Why not $12.00 or $14.00 (which Macmillan wanted to charge)? If you read some of the Kindle users' blogs, they are adamant that $9.99 is the right price, and that $14.00 is too high - but how do they know?

(2) Why would Macmillan care if Amazon charges too little for Kindle pricing anyway? It doesn't directly affect their profits (Amazon makes up the difference).

Well, as it turns out, the underlying framework behind both of these questions is carefully discussed and elucidated in this very book!

As to issue (1), Poundstone argues that much of what we think of as "fair" pricing is nothing more than a collection of cognitive fallacies and biases. The most important of these fallacies are the contrast effect (pricing taking on significance from neighboring prices) and the anchoring effect (we are drawn to a particular number).... Poundstone illustrates these effects, and the process by which their importance was recognized first in the literature and then in consumer practice, through a long series of vignettes that recapitulate the genesis and development of pricing theory, behavioral economics, and psychological decision theory. So as it issue (1), Poundstone would probably argue that many of the reasons people give to support $9.99 as being more "fair" than $14.00 are illusory - that pricing is far more fluid and idiosyncratic than most people appreciate.

As to (2), Poundstone might argue that Macmillan is worried about the contrast effect. Macmillan would be concerned that even to a person who does not have nor intend ever to acquire a Kindle, the proximity of the $9.99 would make its hardback price of say $18.00 seem higher than it actually was to a consumer. So this book lends support to Macmillan's position as to issue (2).

Now, let me briefly get to the meat of the book.

The book is structured along the lines of that distinctive modern subgenre of popular economics books in which anecdote and biography are interwoven and are equal partners with theory and experiment. Careful measurements by colorful character, in the stories of these works, gradually overturns entrenched orthodoxy, first in a small-scale and then in the large. Popular exponents of this style include Malcolm Gladwell, whose Tipping Point, Blink, and What the Dog Saw are canonical examples; Michael Lewis, whose Money Ball described the impact of statistics on baseball; Thomas Bass, whose Eudaemonic Pie and The Predictors foreshadowed the more modern style and which treated the impact of statistics and nonlinear modelling (chaos theory) respectively; Sam Savage, whose Flaw of Averages is a good introduction to statistics in this style; and of course Steven Levitt with his Freakonomics series.

This book is a worthy and interesting addition to the genre. Of the many interesting anecdotes, my favorite was probably Eskildsen and the World Trade Center, and how Las Vegas turned out to play a major role in the development of psychology. The cast of characters, including ex-Israeli soldiers among others, was very entertaining. And the theory, although of course subject to some carping (no confidence factors in many of the studies reported, for example) highlighted the key points clearly and gave the reader clear paths for further knowledge.

Thus, I would recommend this book as a good introduction not only to pricing but also to behavioral economics and human decision-making generally. Read more ›

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Googled together? May 4, 2010

By BEL8490

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

From "The recursive Universe" (1984) till "Fortune's Formula" (2005), I am a longtime mostly happy reader of Poundstone. This time, I'm not.
The present book is a loose collection of newspaper like items, 57 in total and grouped into four parts. Nowhere in the book I found an explanation
what the parts stand for. Nor is there any introduction explaining the structure of the book or its goals. Neither is there any conclusion at the end.
Googling the internet on Kahneman, Tversky and Thaler would probably catch 80 percent of the contents, if not more. But Poundstone did that for me.
Is it worth its price? According to Max Bazerman, Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School on the backflap:
"If you can get this book for under $100, grab it! After you read it, you will better understand why the price you paid felt like a bargain".
I got the book for $17.81 (march 2010). Given the set anchor and the priceless project theory, I should feel happy. But I don't.
Which could explain why its current (may 2010) price is under $15.

You can get a free flavour of the anecdotical topics covered in the book at: [...]