The Irrational Bundle. Dan Ariely

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ recounting of the history of zero. But the concept of zero applied to money is less clearly understood. In fact, I don’t think it even has a history. Nonetheless, FREE! has huge implications, extending not only to discount prices and promotions, but also to how FREE! can be used to help us make decisions that would benefit ourselves and society.

      If FREE! were a virus or a subatomic particle, I might use an electron microscope to probe the object under the lens, stain it with different compounds to reveal its nature, or somehow slice it apart to reveal its inner composition. In behavioral economics we use a different instrument, however, one that allows us to slow down human behavior and examine it frame by frame, as it unfolds. As you have undoubtedly guessed by now, this procedure is called an experiment.

      IN ONE EXPERIMENT, Kristina Shampanier (a PhD student at MIT), Nina Mazar (a professor at the University of Toronto), and I went into the chocolate business. Well, sort of. We set up a table at a large public building and offered two kinds of chocolates—Lindt truffles and Hershey’s Kisses. There was a large sign above our table that read, “One chocolate per customer.” Once the potential customers stepped closer, they could see the two types of chocolate and their prices.*

      For those of you who are not chocolate connoisseurs, Lindt is produced by a Swiss firm that has been blending fine cocoas for 160 years. Lindt’s chocolate truffles are particularly prized—exquisitely creamy and just about irresistible. They cost about 30 cents each when we buy them in bulk. Hershey’s Kisses, on the other hand, are good little chocolates, but let’s face it, they are rather ordinary: Hershey cranks out 80 million Kisses a day. In Hershey, Pennsylvania, even the streetlamps are made in the shape of the ubiquitous Hershey’s Kiss.

      So what happened when the “customers” flocked to our table? When we set the price of a Lindt truffle at 15 cents and a Kiss at one cent, we were not surprised to find that our customers acted with a good deal of rationality: they compared the price and quality of the Kiss with the price and quality of the truffle, and then made their choice. About 73 percent of them chose the truffle and 27 percent chose a Kiss.

      Now we decided to see how FREE! might change the situation. So we offered the Lindt truffle for 14 cents and the Kisses free. Would there be a difference? Should there be? After all, we had merely lowered the price of both kinds of chocolate by one cent.

      But what a difference FREE! made. The humble Hershey’s 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 СКАЧАТЬ