20120506 Follow Me 359 Paying what you want-Conscience v commerce

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本文选自经济学家
Paying what you want-Conscience v commerce
文章对应录音如下:
078 Finance and economics - Paying what you want.mp3
EARLY in the study of economics, students are introduced to Homo economicus, a rough caricature of a human being with an eye to extracting the maximum personal advantage from any given situation. In the real world, of course, human behaviour is much more complicated than that. One example is a pricing strategy called “pay what you want”, in which customers are allowed to choose any price—even zero—for a good. Despite the obvious benefit of getting something for nothing, many people nevertheless choose to pay. The model hit the news in 2007 when Radiohead, a British band, released their album “In Rainbows” on the internet with just such a pricing arrangement.

A team of researchers led by Ayelet Gneezy at the University of California’s Rady School of Management has now published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that makes some suggestions about the psychological underpinnings of this generosity. They finger the ego—in particular, a desire to think of yourself as a good person. And they find that allowing people to name their own price may result in fewer sales than the old-fashioned approach of simply setting a single price for everybody.

The researchers ran three experiments. The first involved more than 53,000 customers of a theme park, who were photographed while riding a rollercoaster. In one iteration of the experiment, customers were offered the chance to buy the photo for a price of their own choosing. In the second run, they were offered the same deal, except that half their suggested price would be donated to a children’s charity.

The researchers noted two big effects. The average price suggested by those in the group benefiting the charity was over five times as high as that suggested by the first group. At the same time, only half as many people in the second group wanted to buy a photo. The researchers argue that the two results are linked: because the “right” price for the charity-and-photo combination was felt to be so much higher, a significant number of people preferred not to buy at all than to damage their self-image by offering a miserly price, and, by extension, a tight-fisted donation to a deserving cause.

The second experiment confirmed the first. Passengers on a boat trip were photographed and then offered the chance to buy the photos. This time Dr Gneezy and his colleagues controlled their subjects’ expectations more directly. For one group, the price was set at $15, for another it was $5, and the third were allowed to name their own price. All three groups were told that the normal price was $15. As expected, demand for photos rose when the price dropped from $15 to $5. But it fell again when people could pick their price. Again the researchers suggest that an overly low price can feel unpleasantly parsimonious. In contrast, “when the company sets the price at $5, there is no ambiguity about fairness, self-image concerns disappear and people are happy to pay.”

To determine whether it is your conscience that prods you to be generous, as opposed to pressure from your peers, the third experiment took place in a restaurant in which customers chose the price paid for a meal. One group was allowed to pay secretly; another paid in public. The people allowed to pay their bills anonymously chose to pay more, on average, than those who paid in public. Radiohead, for their part, seem to have anticipated Dr Gneezy’s conclusions. Their latest album, “The King of Limbs”, was again released online—but only for a fixed price, of $9.

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关键词：Conscience Commerce Science Paying follow 录音 advantage customers situation

Such experimental economic study is really burning, and many results betrayed the naive assumption of rational individual.

But this article, is somehow not so incisive in challenging Raional People assumption. People do not set up the optimal financial price due to their ego. However, their ego action is a response to surroundings, which still may be perceived as an optimal response given human environment. Such article can be too easily incorporated into classical model, and therefore no stunning innovation can be expected.

The model about “pay what you want" is very ideal.
It is not suitable in  real world, for example, China.

This is very interesting! By the way, Radiohead is kind of memory, but haven't heard their songs for a long time.

Other theories may also explain the phenomena, such as repeated game theory and auction theory.  Besides, we don't know whether the experiment was taken under an environment that the persons involved didn't know they were experimented.