May 2020 1

As pricing and increasing sales for online events is currently a hot topic, I thought it’s a good time to remind about anchoring effect.

In 1974 Kahneman and Tversky did an experiment in which they first asked participants to spin a wheel containing the numbers 1 through 100 (but participants were not told that the wheel was rigged to land on either 10 or 65).  Then the scientists asked them whether the percentage of African countries that belong to the U.N. was higher or lower than the number on the wheel, and last, they asked what each participant’s own estimate of the percentage would be.

The results indicated what is now known as anchoring effect.