Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions. Dan Ariely

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СКАЧАТЬ Kiss became a big favorite. Some 69 percent of our customers (up from 27 percent before) chose the FREE! Kiss, giving up the opportunity to get the Lindt truffle for a very good price. Meanwhile, the Lindt truffle took a tumble; customers choosing it decreased from 73 to 31 percent.

      What was going on here? First of all, let me say that there are many times when getting FREE! items can make perfect sense. If you find a bin of free athletic socks at a department store, for instance, there's no downside to grabbing all the socks you can. The critical issue arises when FREE! becomes a struggle between a free item and another item—a struggle in which the presence of FREE! leads us to make a bad decision. For instance, imagine going to a sports store to buy a pair of white socks, the kind with a nicely padded heel and a gold toe. Fifteen minutes later you're leaving the store, not with the socks you came in for, but with a cheaper pair that you don't like at all (without a padded heel and gold toe) but that came in a package with a FREE! second pair. This is a case in which you gave up a better deal and settled for something that was not what you wanted, just because you were lured by the FREE!

      To replicate this experience in our chocolate experiment, we told our customers that they could choose only a single sweet—the Kiss or the truffle. It was an either-or decision, like choosing one kind of athletic sock over another. That's what made the customers' reaction to the FREE! Kiss so dramatic: Both chocolates were discounted by the same amount of money. The relative price difference between the two was unchanged—and so was the expected pleasure from both.

      According to standard economic theory (simple cost-benefit analysis), then, the price reduction should not lead to any change in the behavior of our customers. Before, about 27 percent chose the Kiss and 73 percent chose the truffle. And since nothing had changed in relative terms, the response to the price reduction should have been exactly the same. A passing economist, twirling his cane and espousing conventional economic theory, in fact, would have said that since everything in the situation was the same, our customers should have chosen the truffles by the same margin of preference.*

      And yet here we were, with people pressing up to the table to grab our Hershey's Kisses, not because they had made a reasoned cost-benefit analysis before elbowing their way in, but simply because the Kisses were FREE! How strange (but predictable) we humans are!

      THIS CONCLUSION, INCIDENTALLY, remained the same in other experiments as well. In one case we priced the Hershey's Kiss at two cents, one cent, and zero cents, while pricing the truffle correspondingly at 27 cents, 26 cents, and 25 cents.

      We did this to see if discounting the Kiss from two cents to one cent and the truffle from 27 cents to 26 cents would make a difference in the proportion of buyers for each. It didn't. But, once again, when we lowered the price of the Kiss to free, the reaction was dramatic. The shoppers overwhelmingly demanded the Kisses.

      We decided that perhaps the experiment had been tainted, since shoppers may not feel like searching for change in a purse or backpack, or they may not have any money on them. Such an effect would artificially make the free offer seem more attractive. To address this possibility, we ran other experiments at one of MIT's cafeterias. In this setup, the chocolates were displayed next to the cashier as one of the cafeteria's regular promotions and the students who were interested in the chocolates simply added them to the lunch purchase, and paid for them while going through the cashier's line. What happened? The students still went overwhelmingly for the FREE! option.

      WHAT IS IT about FREE! that's so enticing? Why do we have an irrational urge to jump for a FREE! item, even when it's not what we really want?

      I believe the answer is this. Most transactions have an upside and a downside, but when something is FREE! we forget the downside, FREE! gives us such an emotional charge that we perceive what is being offered as immensely more valuable than it really is. Why? I think it's because humans are intrinsically afraid of loss. The real allure of FREE! is tied to this fear. There's no visible possibility of loss when we choose a FREE! item (it's free). But suppose we choose the item that's not free. Uh-oh, now there's a risk of having made a poor decision—the possibility of a loss. And so, given the choice, we go for what is free.

      For this reason, in the land of pricing, zero is not just another price. Sure, 10 cents can make a huge difference in demand (suppose you were selling millions of barrels of oil), but nothing beats the emotional surge of FREE! This, the zero price effect, is in a category all its own.

      To be sure, “buying something for nothing” is a bit of an oxymoron. But let me give you an example of how we often fall into the trap of buying something we may not want, simply because of that sticky substance, FREE!

      In 2007, I saw a newspaper ad from a major electronics maker, offering me seven FREE! DVD titles if I purchased the maker's new high-definition DVD player. First of all, did I need a high-definition player at that time? Probably not. But even if I had, wouldn't it have been wiser to wait for prices to descend? They always do—and today's $600 high-definition DVD player will very quickly be tomorrow's $200 machine. Second, the DVD maker had a clear agenda behind its offer. This company's high-definition DVD system was in cutthroat competition with Blu-ray, a system backed by many other manufacturers. At the time, Blu-ray was ahead and has since gone on to dominate the market. So how much is FREE! when the machine being offered will find its way into obsolescence (like Betamax VCRs)? Those are two rational thoughts that might prevent us from falling under the spell of FREE! But, gee, those FREE! DVDs certainly look good!

      GETTING SOMETHING FREE! is certainly a draw when we talk about prices. But what would happen if the offer was not a free price, but a free exchange? Are we as susceptible to free products as we are to getting products for free? A few years ago, with Halloween drawing near, I had an idea for an experiment to probe that question. This time I wouldn't even have to leave my home to get my answers.

      Early in the evening, Joey, a nine-year-old kid dressed as Spider-Man and carrying a large yellow bag, climbed the stairs of our front porch. His mother accompanied him, to ensure that no one gave her kid an apple with a razor blade inside. (By the way, there never was a case of razor blades being distributed in apples on Halloween; it is just an urban myth.) She stayed on the sidewalk, however, to give Joey the feeling that he was trick-or-treating by himself.

      After the traditional query, “Trick or treat?” I asked Joey to hold open his right hand. I placed three Hershey's Kisses in his palm and asked him to hold them there for a moment. “You can also get one of these two Snickers bars,” I said, showing him a small one and a large one. “In fact, if you give me one of those Hershey's Kisses I will give you this smaller Snickers bar. And if you give me two of your Hershey's Kisses, I will give you this larger Snickers bar.”

      Now a kid may dress up like a giant spider, but that doesn't mean he's stupid. The small Snickers bar weighed one ounce, and the large Snickers bar weighed two ounces. All Joey had to do was give me one additional Hershey's Kiss (about 0.16 ounce) and he would get an extra ounce of Snickers. This deal might have stumped a rocket scientist, but for a nine-year-old boy, the computation was easy: he'd get more than six times the return on investment (in the net weight of chocolate) if he went for the larger Snickers bar. In a flash Joey put two of his Kisses into my hand, took the two-ounce Snickers bar, and dropped it into his bag.

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