One cautionary note is that once you invoke this idea, I feel like you’re indicating willingness to pay the person some amount to do the thing, if you can both agree on a reasonable (cheerful or just satisfactory) number.
Like if I’m kind of inclined to bake you a cake for free, and you ask for my cheerful price and I tell you—even if you don’t take up the offer at my cheerful price, I’m definitely not going to make the cake for free now. That would be bad business.
Strongly disagree with this. The honest cheerful price is sometimes $0, and if that’s true you should say $0, and presumably then do the thing given you were asked for your price.
It’s bad short term profit maximization but if you were purely doing short term profit maximization you never would have been inclined to bake the cake for free in the first place.
This doesn’t parse as disagreement—Eukaryote only said that asker should be willing to pay a nonzero amount, not that a nonzero payment should actually happen.
So, according to my read of Eukaryote (and also according to me):
“My cheerful price is $0” / “great, will you do it for $0?”—fine.
“My cheerful price is $0.01” / “oh, hm, I don’t actually want to pay a cent for it”—not cool.
“Honestly I’d have done it for free as a favor, but since you ask my cheerful price is $5” / “oh, okay, will you do it for free?”—not cool.
(Edited to add:) “Honestly I’d have done it for free as a favor, but since you ask my cheerful price is $5” / “hm, I don’t want to pay $5, but will you do it for $2?”—fine.
That’s a possibility, sure, but not an overriding one.
Consider the case that your happy price is $5. It’s worth it to you to do for free if your friend wants a cake, as it is a small cost for the sake of a friend. How you balance the costs and benefits of maintaining a relationship is up to you.
Y hates baking, and out of typical-minding expected it to be more like $40 when she asked. She can, at that point, just ask you to do her a personal favor on the scale of $5. How scrupulously you follow up on favours and IOUs is also up to you.
One cautionary note is that once you invoke this idea, I feel like you’re indicating willingness to pay the person some amount to do the thing, if you can both agree on a reasonable (cheerful or just satisfactory) number.
Like if I’m kind of inclined to bake you a cake for free, and you ask for my cheerful price and I tell you—even if you don’t take up the offer at my cheerful price, I’m definitely not going to make the cake for free now. That would be bad business.
Strongly disagree with this. The honest cheerful price is sometimes $0, and if that’s true you should say $0, and presumably then do the thing given you were asked for your price.
It’s bad short term profit maximization but if you were purely doing short term profit maximization you never would have been inclined to bake the cake for free in the first place.
This doesn’t parse as disagreement—Eukaryote only said that asker should be willing to pay a nonzero amount, not that a nonzero payment should actually happen.
So, according to my read of Eukaryote (and also according to me):
“My cheerful price is $0” / “great, will you do it for $0?”—fine.
“My cheerful price is $0.01” / “oh, hm, I don’t actually want to pay a cent for it”—not cool.
“Honestly I’d have done it for free as a favor, but since you ask my cheerful price is $5” / “oh, okay, will you do it for free?”—not cool.
(Edited to add:) “Honestly I’d have done it for free as a favor, but since you ask my cheerful price is $5” / “hm, I don’t want to pay $5, but will you do it for $2?”—fine.
That’s a possibility, sure, but not an overriding one.
Consider the case that your happy price is $5. It’s worth it to you to do for free if your friend wants a cake, as it is a small cost for the sake of a friend. How you balance the costs and benefits of maintaining a relationship is up to you.
Y hates baking, and out of typical-minding expected it to be more like $40 when she asked. She can, at that point, just ask you to do her a personal favor on the scale of $5. How scrupulously you follow up on favours and IOUs is also up to you.