Margen
A hundred students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were handed the subscription page of The Economist, and the economist Dan Ariely noted down what each of them chose.
1. Web only, 59 dollars: 16 people. 2. Print only, 125 dollars: nobody. 3. Print and web, 125 dollars: 84 people.
Ariely then removed option 2, the one nobody had wanted, and ran the test again with another hundred students. Without it, 68 went for the 59-dollar deal and only 32 for the 125-dollar one. By dropping a product nobody was buying, the magazine ended up with less money.
Option 2 was never there to be sold: its job was to make option 3 look like a gift, same price and twice the goods. It is called the decoy effect, and it works because comparing two nearly identical products is easy, while comparing two different ones is tiring. Ariely published it in 2008.
Tomorrow, faced with three tariffs, look for the one that is worse than another at the same price. Cross it out and choose again with the two that are left.