“At McDonald’s, 4 nuggets cost 7.50, 6 nuggets cost 17 hryvnias and 9 nuggets cost 30 hryvnias. But there are people who still buy the 6 and the 9.”
I don’t know if it’s true, but if it is, it’s a trick worthy of Levinson himself, the man who coined “guerrilla marketing” ;) Comrade @just_daf, though, thinks it works because people are emotional and “don’t want to think”. I don’t think so. People aren’t that dumb: if you point the arithmetic out to someone, they’ll do the sum and take 2×4 pieces. It’s just that few people notice details like that. Our heads are busy with a pile of problems, and we’re not exactly in the habit of calculating the marginal utility of pieces of chicken-like something in a fast-food joint :D
Many people cite examples like this as proof that people buy emotionally (and so irrationally), but I’d say this is context, and context is rarely accounted for in lab games of dictators and prisoners.
Either way, it’s a great example of good pricing, based on practice and plain cunning rather than “we’ll add 1 dollar to every kilo of sausage, and that’s our profit”. Cheers.