Restaurant Menu Pricing

This may have been posted here before, but I only just noticed it in the annual roundup. I thought a few other people might be interested. I some of these characteristics could be useful on the pricing page of web software.

Restaurant Menu Pricing
neurosciencemarketing.com

"Predictably Irrational" Dan Ariely is a book on exactly such marketing tricks, it's a really good read.

Clearly, these sorts of strategies have applications well beyond restaurant menus.

About 15 years ago, taking a usability engineering class from Randy Pausch at UVa (yes, that Randy Pausch), I worked with a team that was determined to develop a "cheat sheet" to help CS students debug the awful HP Laserjet IV printers in the UVa CS lab.

Think "PC LOAD LETTER?! What the f* does that mean?!"

After several user rounds of user-testing, we found ourselves using similar tricks. While iterating on documentation that would maximize our users' success, we occasionally found it necessary to provide partial information or even outright lie to the user! While this sounds under-handed, it was done to (1) help the user accomplish their intended goal (e.g., fix the damn printer) and (2) ensure that the user read enough of the instructions to be able to perform the task.

In all seriousness, we found that most CS students, unsurprisingly, do not have the patience to RTFM. But we were ultimately successful in tricking them into doing the right things.

How we phrased and partitioned the branching instructions turned out to be more important than providing a deep understanding of the printer itself.

Then again, some of the solutions to HP LJ IV problems, derived from their awful awful manual, seem like voodoo. ;-)

I don't think you are understanding this article correctly. The 'decoy item' would be a very high priced item that the restaurant does not expect to actually sell: '$96 Coq au Vin for Two. Reserve 24 hours in advance.' The $12 chicken is what they actually expect to sell, based on how reasonable it seems. It is not a decoy, rather the dish that the restaurant wants you to buy.

The pasta is a concession to the value consumer, and while it's high margin, given high fixed costs the restaurant would likely go out of business if it sold nothing by inexpensive pasta dishes. Ingredient costs are around 25% of the menu price, higher for expensive places and lower for chains. Differences in prices between dishes are generally not equal to differences in the cost of ingredients.

From your example, your implication is that all dishes in that restaurant are overpriced. While this may certainly be true relative to the cost of making the food yourself (presuming free time and available equipment) this belief should be tempered by the number of profit-less restaurants that go out of business each year. There's nothing wrong with your belief, but I don't think it's that relevant to discussions of 'decoy pricing'.

I would love to see a few examples from the printer cheat sheet. I'm sure this would be helpful in structuring user manuals and other documentation.