New York Magazine Excerpt

New York magazine is running an excerpt of my upcoming book Priceless. It tells how to decode menus. Patrons of the New York eatery Balthazar should particularly take note.

The Gender Surcharge

The January 2010 Consumer Reports has an article that's sure to provoke some outrage. "Roam any drugstore and you'll see products that seem to be twins, except for one thing: One is for women, the other for men. We discovered that products directed at women—through packaging, description, or name—might cost up to 50 percent more than similar products for men."
For instance, a can of men's Barbasol shaving cream costs $1.69. A skinnier can of the women's version contains less product yet sells for $2.49. Nivea Body Wash for men is $5.49; the same size container of the women's product is $7.49. A four-pack of Schick Quattro razors is $10.49 for men, $10.99 for women. The biggest difference CU found was for Neutragena eye cream, at $9.99 for the gentlemen and $14.99 for the ladies.
Even when prices seem the same, they're not. Both men's and women's Degree antiperspirant cost $3.59 — but the men's version contains 2.7 ounces, v. 2.6 ounces for the women's. And even when products seem to be different, they may not be. Excedrin Menstrual Complete has the same active ingredients, in the same amounts, as the regular Excedrin. But 20 gel caps of Menstrual Complete runs $6.49, v. $5.99 for 20 gels of the regular pain reliever.
The magazine asked the manufacturers to comment. Their explanations ranged from the half-believable (women shave in the shower, so their shaving cream comes in a more expensive rust-resistant can) to the amusingly ingenious (women's Nivea "has skin-sensation technology.")
Psychologists suspect that gender plays a big role in the prices we pay. It is nonetheless tricky to draw conclusions from the shopping aisle, where there are so many variables. Some of the most compelling experiments have used a simple bargaining game, the "ultimatum game." One person is given $10 to split with another. A split might be "I keep $6 and you get $4." Provided the other person agrees, the money is divided as proposed. But should the other person reject the offer, neither gets anything. Think of a vendor in a bazaar setting a price. He want to keep as much profit as possible for himself by naming a high price. But if he demands too high a price, the customers will walk away.
In a typical ultimatum game, the splitter keeps a little more than half of the $10, and the other person OKs the deal. Psychologist and behavioral economist Sara Solnick, now at the University of Vermont, did a clever version of the game focusing on gender. The players sat on opposite sides of a partition and could not see each other. One group learned the first name of their partner and thus knew the partner's gender. Another group never heard names and had no idea whether they were playing with a man or a woman.
The splitters who didn’t know their partner's gender offered an average of $4.68 out of $10. But for those who knew their partner was a man, the average offer was a more generous $4.89. When they knew they were dealing with a woman, the average was only $4.37.
Solnick also had players state the minimum offer they would accept. This minimum was higher when they knew their partner was female. Women got the short end of the stick, no matter which role they played.
It's possible that similar dynamics apply in the supermarket aisle. Women's products may cost more because women are a little less price-sensitive than men. Is that unfair? Maybe, but Solnick's experiment leaves little scope for anyone to feel morally superior. Her subjects were college kids too young to remember a pre-feminist past. They probably would have loudly rejected a sexual double standard, had they been asked. But they had no idea this experiment was "about" gender. Both women and men unconsciously set higher "prices" for female partners.
That underlying psychology poses some difficult challenges to our would-be egalitarian society. What's to be done when people who aren't sexist unknowingly act as if they were? It's a question we'll probably be wrestling with for years to come.
As usual, Consumer Reports has this sensible advice for shoppers: Ignore the gender marketing and buy whatever is cheaper.

SEE ALSO
Solnick, Sara (2001). "Gender Differences in the Ultimatum Game," Economic Inquiry, April 2001, 39(2): 189-200.

Double Take

Some readers may be wondering why the cover of my new book, Priceless, looks something like that of Chris Anderson's recent book Free. Did my publisher rip off the Free design? Short answer: no.
"It takes as long to make a book as to make a baby." That was the wry industry maxim back when publishers took three-martini lunches and Bennett Cerf was a panelist on What's My Line?. From finished manuscript to physical books took nine months. For reasons mysterious to almost everyone, the digital age hasn't speeded things up one iota. You might think that, now that manuscripts don't have to be rekeyed by typsetters, they could have shaved it to, oh, eight months? Nope. It's still nine. Anyway, the Priceless cover was created a couple of months before Free came out — notwithstanding the fact that Priceless is being published in January, six months after the Anderson book.

We started bouncing around ideas for a cover in April 2009. Publisher Thomas LeBien had the notion of putting a fake price on the jacket and having it "marked down" to the real price. By the end of May, the artist had developed this idea into the cover you see above. Hill and Wang had had success with a trompe l'oeil cover for my Fortune's Formula (left). The fake roulette chips made people want to pick up the book, and maybe that had something to do with the book's success. The Priceless design continued this theme with a very realistic pricetag projecting from a clothbound volume (this is all a printed jacket, of course). I loved the cover, and so did seemingly everyone who saw it. It was quickly approved and went out in the Hill and Wang catalogs.
Then on June 24, I saw a piece in the Los Angeles Times about Anderson's book, with an illustration of the cover. I e-mailed my editor, Joe Wisnovsky, and after due editorial handwringing, it was decided to stick with the cover we all liked. The reasoning was:
• The books are being published six months apart, and that makes it a bit less awkward.
• The two books' subject matter is quite distinct. Priceless is about the hidden psychology of prices, and Free is about giving away free content in the Internet, to promote the sale of something else.
• As mortifying as this might be to us (we thought we were so original!), it's not such a big deal with book buyers. Many won't notice, anyway.
• Some Chris Anderson fans might falsely assume that Priceless is a follow-up or response to Free. It's not, but if they want to buy it, it's a free country.
• Mainly, we just thought the cover worked and there was no point in switching to a less appealing cover to avoid an honest coincidence. The verisimitude is amazing, particularly in the actual object. Joe Wisnovsky showed both covers, side by side, to his brother-in-law, a French architect and talented amateur artist. He pronounced ours far more intriguing and eye-catching. Okay, it's like passing around baby photos — I'm sure that Chris Anderson likes his cover better. But I think it's a cool cover.
Just in case you're wondering, the hardcover version of Free costs $29.99, and Priceless is $26.99. Yes, that's another similarity: both use charm prices (ending in "9").

How Much for a Can of Whoop Ass?

How much would you pay for a can of Whoop Ass? Regular Facebook users will recognize the Whoop Ass as a popular "virtual gift" in the networking site's Gift Shop. The price is 10 credits. That's $1 in Earth money. For the same price, you can buy a rose, a slinky, a troll doll, or your favorite team's mascot — all virtual. They're nothing more than icons you can post on a friend's page — pixels with a price tag. The surprising thing is how big the virtual goods industry has become. Merchandise-that-isn't-really-there is one the few bright spots in a dismal economy. By one estimate it brings in a billion dollars a year, just in the U.S. To put it in perspective, that's roughly what Americans spend on lipstick or Mini Coopers.
It wasn't so long ago that virtual goods were limited to "weapons" and "spells" that hardcore gamers bought, to the befuddlement of most everyone female or over 30. That started to change with Second Life, the networked simulation game. The currency of Second Life is called "Linden Dollars," with about L$266 to the U.S. Dollar. By that standard, many prices in Second Life are bargains. A Linden Dollar will buy a new hair style or tattoo for your avatar. That sounds really great, until you try to explain to a nonplayer exactly what it is you bought.

One of the attractions of Second Life is that you can play for free. You quickly discover that this is like saying you can live in Manhattan for free — by sleeping on friends' couches. Your Second Life avatar will be homeless unless you fork over $9.95 a month (real dollars) to get a premium account with 512 square meters of land. That's about enough for a small tract house. Intentionally or not, much of Second Life is a dead-on caricature of our society's obsession with real estate. The point of Second Life is to impress your virtual friends, and that generally means building a virtual McMansion. Larger properties are available for sale or auction and yes, there are Second Life home flippers.
"For outsiders, the selling of virtual goods — items with no actual value in the real world — might seem the very definition of a swindle," wrote Claire Cain Miller and Brad Stone in The New York Times. Actually, the virtual product business says a lot about the real-world price decisions we all make. The products may be imaginary but buyer psychology is pretty much the same.

The virtual merchants use a trick familiar to every world traveler. Confronted with an unfamiliar currency, we all splurge and tip more freely than we would, blinded by a smokescreen of exchange rates and prices strictly for tourists. To Americans overseas, yen or lira just don't seem like "real money." That's the reason for the virtual currencies. We normally feel a conflict between the desire to spend and the obligation to save. Spending is fun, and saving is what we do because we'll feel guilty otherwise. But once you buy Linden dollars, credits, or other virtual currencies, you're committed to spend. What else are they for? It's difficult to convert virtual currencies back to real money, and nobody feels a pang of guilt about not squirreling Linden dollars away in a 401(k). The exchange rates of virtual currencies are often intentionally confusing. To convert Linden dollars to U.S. dollars, you have to divide by 266. Much of the time, that's just too much bother. Instead, Second Lifers think in Linden Dollars, which is to say, they take cues from the prices they see posted in the virtual world. Your friend buys an island, and you want an island. It's only money — and fake money, at that.

“Artisanal”: A Word That’ll Cost You

How much is a word worth? If the word is "artisanal," a lot. Try pricing artisanal chocolates or artisanal jeans. Studio D'Artisan jeans run $350, while some R by 45RPM models can still top $1000, even in these chastened times. The word "artisanal" also works its magic on menus and in markets. Foodies will insist that "artisanal" is a meaningful distinction in danger of being overused. That ship has sailed. The "artisanal" bread on some of Jack in the Box's sandwiches has "become a huge hit with the burgers-and-fries crowd," crowed a 2004 press release. Diet conscious? Weight Watchers has "Artisan" pizza. You'll find it in your grocer's frozen-food aisle.

What does "artisanal" mean, anyway? For one thing, it means the seller can charge more money. Psychological studies have refuted the longtime economic notion of a "reserve price," a fixed maximum one is willing to pay for something. Is $8 reasonable price for a box of chocolates, or is $80? The answer will depend on the context: how nice a box it's in, what we see other people buying, and so on. Above all, we rely on memory. In deciding whether $80 is too much to pay for chocolates, I remember the prices I've seen advertised and what I paid the last time. Remembered prices allow us to impose a veneer of rationality and consistency on our money decisions. Inside, we're more like kids in a candy store. We want what we want, and we haven't a clue what it should cost.
That's where a word like "artisanal" comes in. Its sends the message, remembered prices don't count. "Artisanal" jeans are different from plain old jeans. Therefore, the old prices don't apply. The consumer is left guessing at what a fair price might be. Influenced by context (stores are all about context) many choose to pay a price that has little to do with the cost of materials and labor. Eric Wilson, in The New York Times, wrote

During the modern gilded age, the spiraling prices of designer clothes had more to do with driving profits than the actual design or construction of a garment. Designers found they could charge a lot for the perception of prestige. Dresses and suits and handbags were priced like cars, and consumers didn’t blink. But with jeans, it just felt more obvious that some kind of game was being played; the basic elements, after all, had not changed substantially in decades: five pockets, cotton, some rivets.


Don't get me wrong: Many "artisanal" products are truly superior. The term's adoption by frozen and fast-food producers suggests it's also smart marketing. Jack in the Box charges more for its artisanal-bread sandwiches than for more meat-intensive burgers.
Why has "artisanal" been so widely adopted? Probably because it's one of those poetic terms (like "creamery" butter and "heirloom" tomatoes) that sounds great without making much of a factual claim. An artisan is someone who makes something, so "artisanal" can basically apply to anything made by humans. It's therefore become the all-purpose excuse for charging a premium.

“10 for $10”

Price labels like this have become a sign of the Great Recession. You're invited to buy ten of something for $10. Small print says "$1.00 each." Huh? That's right, there's no discount for buying ten items. So what's the point?
Rest assured that supermarkets must have reason to believe that these labels boost sales. The question is, how? I'm not aware of any academic papers directly addressing 10/$10 pricing. Two ideas come to mind.
One is that it's a twist on the old "economy size" tactic. Many shoppers instinctively reach for the bigger package — or shop at the big box store — in the belief that they're getting a better deal. Sometimes they are, and sometimes they aren't. In this case, shoppers might lob ten cans into their cart and never read the fine print.
I doubt too many people do that, though. It seems that 10-for-$10 pricing is mostly applied when you wouldn't normally buy ten of an item. I don't think I've ever bought ten cans of anything, save soft drinks. My impulse would be to scrutinize the label to see whether you can buy less than ten at the special price — which you can.
An alternate explanation for 10/$10 prices is anchoring, the cognitive phenomenon described by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman in the 1970s. Anchoring occurs when we guesstimate numerical quantities. Shoppers do that a lot. The shopper must decide, how much should I pay? and how many should I buy? Strict logic cannot answer such questions. The answer is necessarily intuitive (and often, must be made while wrestling kids or yakking on the cellphone). It's been shown that when people have to come up with a numerical estimate on intuitive grounds, they are easily swayed by any numbers provided as cues (or "anchors.") With 10/$10 pricing, the suggested ten items becomes an anchor. It sends the subtle message, of course you need ten cans of salsa this week! On the face of it, that sounds ridiculous. But anchoring exerts an effect even when we know the cue is absurd.
One of the most amusing anchoring experiments, by Karen Jacowitz and Daniel Kahneman, asked a group of subjects this two-part question:

(a) Does the average American eat more or less than 50 pounds of meat a year?
(b) How much meat does the average American eat in a year?

The group's median answer was 100 pounds of meat. The researchers asked a separate group a similar question, except that this time, part (a) asked whether the average American ate more or less than 1000 pounds of meat. For this group, the median estimate was 500 pounds. Just hearing a different cue — 1000 rather than 50 pounds — boosted the group's estimate five-fold. Furthermore, anyone who thought about it could have calculated that 1000 pounds was a ridiculous answer. It would be the equivalent of ten McDonald's Quarter-Pounders a day! The ridiculous anchor value still had a huge statistical effect on answers.
In the experiment, the subjects were simply guessing the answer to a trivia question. Shoppers guess too in estimating how many cans of salsa their family will eat. It's possible that 10-for-$10 pricing has an effect similar to the cues in Jacowitz and Kahneman's experiment. It makes shoppers buy more items than they would have.

SEE ALSO
Jacowitz, Karen E., and Daniel Kahneman (1995). “Measuring of anchoring in estimation tasks.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 21, 1161-1166.

Living Next to the Obamas: Worth $500,000?

The home next to Barack Obama's in Hyde Park, Chicago, has just gone on the market. Reports The New York Times,

The price? Hard to know, real estate agents say, because not since Richard M. Nixon lived in a New York City apartment has the market tried to assess the value of immediate proximity to the president in a dense urban neighborhood. (The Greenwood Avenue neighbors are separated by about 20 feet, a line of thin trees and an iron fence that is more decorative than forbidding.) The Grimshaws paid $35,000 in 1973; other homes in the area have sold for $1 million to $2.5 million.
“We think there’s a premium,” said Matt Garrison, the listing agent with Coldwell Banker, who does not intend to put an asking price on the house. “We don’t know what the Obama effect is.”
Mr. Garrison said he had tried to scout similar parcels of residential property, but pointed out that there was no family living next door to the White House.
“I tried to look at 12 Downing Street, but that’s all offices,” Mr. Garrison said, referring to the building next door to the British prime minister’s residence in London.

Needless to say, the Obamas aren't spending much time in Chicago these days. Thus the value of living next-door to "Barry" and Michelle amounts to a rather vague bragging right. This can't be called an "entertainer's house" as the Secret Service bars the street to non-residents. (Yes, that's even with the Obamas in Washington.) Sellers Bill and Jackie Grimshaw were urban pioneers who bought a down-at-heel mansion in a gritty neighborhood. Now the area has gentrified, and like most people in that position, the Grimshaws live a bit more modestly than the pool of likely buyers. (“I didn’t lavish attention on the house,” Professor Grimshaw admits. Mocking an outraged, imaginary potential buyer, he said: “Where’s the granite? How can people live like this?”) By current Hyde Park standards, it's a fixer-upper.
Evidently the listing agent chose not to have an asking price out of fear it would be too low (cheating the seller) or too high (scaring off buyers). There is considerable evidence that it would be wiser to set a high price and be willing to come down. The list price is an "anchor" that exerts a powerful influence on estimations of value. In a 1987 paper, Gregory Northcraft and Margaret Neale, then at the University of Arizona, studied the effect of listing prices on perceptions of real estate values in Tucson. The effect was huge: even practicing real estate agents could be swayed 14 percent in their estimations of fair market value. For regular folks, the effect was twice that. That's an advantage no home seller should ever willingly cede.


Zillow estimates the value of the Grimshaw house (5040 S. Greenwood Avenue, centered in the aerial view above) at $1,837,000. It also appears to confirm a substantial Obama premium. This Zillow chart traces the house's estimated value over the last year, compared to average values for the 60615 zip code and Chicago. Not surprisingly, Chicago values are down 10 percent over the past year. But Hyde Park's zip code is flat, and the Grimshaw house is up a hefty 38 percent.


Zillow's pricing formula doesn't factor in an Obama premium, not directly. And the estimates for the Grimshaw house actually dipped after the election. That may reflect the time lag for nearby houses to go on the market and close escrow at prices reflecting the Obama premium. If accurate, the Zillow figures imply the Grimshaws are up about half a million, thanks to the neighbors.

SEE ALSO
Northcraft, Gregory B., and Margaret A. Neale (1987). “Experts, Amateurs, and Real Estate: An Anchoring-and-Adjustment Perspective on Property Pricing Decisions.” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 84, 87-93.