The Babylonians invented the concept of zero the ancient Greeks debated it in lofty terms (how could something be nothing?) the ancient Indian scholar Pingala paired Zero with the numeral 1 to get double digits and both the Mayans and the Romans made Zero a part of their numeral systems. Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions (Later, when I tested the offer on a large number of participants, the vast majority preferred the Internet-and-print deal.)” And I have to admit, if I had been inclined to subscribe I probably would have taken the package deal myself. In fact, you could reasonably deduce that in the combination package, the Internet subscription is free! “It's a bloody steal-go for it, governor!” I could almost hear them shout from the riverbanks of the Thames. But I certainly knew that the print-and-Internet option for $125 was better than the print-only option at $125.
(For instance, we don't know how much a six-cylinder car is worth, but we can assume it's more expensive than the four-cylinder model.) In the case of the Economist, I may not have known whether the Internet-only subscription at $59 was a better deal than the print-only option at $125.
Rather, we focus on the relative advantage of one thing over another, and estimate value accordingly. We don't have an internal value meter that tells us how much things are worth. But how could they manipulate me? I suspect it's because the Economist's marketing wizards (and I could just picture them in their school ties and blazers) knew something important about human behavior: humans rarely choose things in absolute terms. I am pretty certain that they wanted me to skip the Internet-only option (which they assumed would be my choice, since I was reading the advertisement on the Web) and jump to the more expensive option: Internet and print. Who would want to buy the print option alone, I wondered, when both the Internet and the print subscriptions were offered for the same price? Now, the print-only option may have been a typographical error, but I suspect that the clever people at the Economist's London offices (and they are clever-and quite mischievous in a British sort of way) were actually manipulating me. I read it twice before my eye ran back to the previous options. But then I read the third option: a print and Internet subscription for $125.
The second option-the $125 print subscription-seemed a bit expensive, but still reasonable. “Internet subscription for $59-seemed reasonable.
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