Book read: Priceless by William Poundstone

An interesting economics book about how people can be influenced in a subconscious way on the pricing of products in everyday life. Each chapter presents a small experiment or case study and tries to explain the results.

The main themes of the book is anchoring, where someone is drawn to a price by being influenced by seeing (sometimes unrelated) prices or numbers. You can either believe that marketeers are either steeped in this psychology or have found it to work over many years.

It feels like an area a regulator would eventually get hold of and try to control, and also as the secret gets out the effect of such priming of thoughts would have less effect because the subjects "know the game". Still it was nice to have the game explained and the rationale behind it.

The pioneers of this type of thinking, a mix between psychology and economics were Khaneman and Tverskry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amos_Tversky http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Kahneman