Live data from Hacker News

The Psychology of Pricing: A Gigantic List of Strategies

nickkolenda.com

81–85 of 85 posts

Re: The Psychology of Pricing: A Gigantic List of Strategies

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Translated: "That same energy could have been spent on something I care about and not what the author cares about." Which kind of explains why communism always leads to tyranny: it is based on the essentially tyrannical assumption that communists alone have the knowledge to decide how everyone else should be spending thier time, and the moral authority to impose that judgement on others by force. The problem is that…

Just curious, but does communism by necessity or definition require central planning? Is a distributed power model not possible, aside from the fact that it hasn't been done? I'm genuinely curious, as I've never studied political systems in any depth.

It doesn't: in fact, I think central planning is generally what breaks communism.

Kibbutzes and communes generally are communist but work without central planning

Re: The Psychology of Pricing: A Gigantic List of Strategies

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Communism is a philosophy in the first place. It leads to a certain type of governing and managing economy. On practice it also lead into a totalitarian state every single time.

Communes and kibbutzes are almost universally democratically governed, so no it does not lead to a totalitarian state every time. That's a ridiculous claim.

Why do kibbutzim belong to communism? Communism is based on works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. You can't just attach a "communist" tag on every commune that has shared property.

Re: The Psychology of Pricing: A Gigantic List of Strategies

#83
post #67

This kind of stuff is a strong argument for communism. An immense amount of mental energy was squandered on creating this list (not Nick Kolenda, the people who studied these things). That same energy could have been spent on curing any number of psychological ailments, but instead it was spent on getting people to pay more for less. It's interesting, but as far as I'm concerned the energy was wasted.

And the millions of dead in Gulags is a strong argument against communism. I'd take pricing mind tricks any day of the week.

You seem to be confusing communism, a form of economy, with totalitarianism, a form of governance. There are many non-totalitarian examples of communism.

Re: The Psychology of Pricing: A Gigantic List of Strategies

#84
post #47
post #28

This is a great How to be Evil manual. "If you decide to downsize your product, you should reduce the size of all three dimensions — height, width, and length — by an equal amount. Consumers are less likely to notice a change in all three dimensions." "People will perceive your price to be smaller if you display that price in a smaller font." "People will perceive your price to be lower if it contains fewer syllables…

When I shop, I look at the quantity. If my chocolate has 90 grams instead of 100, I'll immediately put it back and look for another brand - because it's too hard for me to compute how much I would get swindled of.

I live in Spain and when you go to supermarkets, all price tags on the shelves and on supermarket-packaged products (pre-cut meat, for example) indicate the cost of the product per unit (big numbers), and per kilo (small numbers), so, if you want, you can quickly and easily compare a package of, say, 136g of meat with other packages, without weight interfering. You can see easily the price per kilo of each kind of meat.
Post reply on HN