I do a similar thing when contemplating buying things like books: I don’t look at the price, then I ask myself “How much would I pay to have this?”, then I check the price. (And then, if it’s a book, I too often buy the damn thing anyway even though the price is higher than the one I decided on. Perfectly rational action is, alas, beyond me.)
Looking at the price gives you information about how valuable and/or rare the thing is, which may in turn affect what price you are willing to pay in such a way that cannot be captured by guessing a price beforehand.
Of course this can be gamed by sellers in specific situations, but sellers who did that every single time would gain a reputation for low-information pricing, which would limit how many sellers actually do that.
Yes, but in the cases I have in mind (e.g., buying a book) it gives very little extra information. If I’ve already had a good look inside a book to assess how interesting the subject matter is, how clearly things are explained, how well written the prose is, how competent the typography is, what sort of paper it’s printed on, etc., knowing the price will tell me basically nothing more about how valuable the book will be to me.
I would not encourage this technique for goods whose present and future price are largely driven by scarcity and whose value to you is substantially affected by your prospects of selling them in the future. But if you’re buying such goods, you should be getting scarcity information from other places besides the current asking price of the particular instance now before you.
Yup.
I do a similar thing when contemplating buying things like books: I don’t look at the price, then I ask myself “How much would I pay to have this?”, then I check the price. (And then, if it’s a book, I too often buy the damn thing anyway even though the price is higher than the one I decided on. Perfectly rational action is, alas, beyond me.)
Looking at the price gives you information about how valuable and/or rare the thing is, which may in turn affect what price you are willing to pay in such a way that cannot be captured by guessing a price beforehand.
Of course this can be gamed by sellers in specific situations, but sellers who did that every single time would gain a reputation for low-information pricing, which would limit how many sellers actually do that.
Yes, but in the cases I have in mind (e.g., buying a book) it gives very little extra information. If I’ve already had a good look inside a book to assess how interesting the subject matter is, how clearly things are explained, how well written the prose is, how competent the typography is, what sort of paper it’s printed on, etc., knowing the price will tell me basically nothing more about how valuable the book will be to me.
I would not encourage this technique for goods whose present and future price are largely driven by scarcity and whose value to you is substantially affected by your prospects of selling them in the future. But if you’re buying such goods, you should be getting scarcity information from other places besides the current asking price of the particular instance now before you.