The number you saw first
Not yetReference price¥24,000
Offered today¥9,800
This is the price of a course. Nothing has been said yet about what is in it. Answer on the numbers alone.
Choose, and the explanation appears below.
Behavioral Lab
A place to choose first and be told afterwards.
On the landing page you were asked to spend 200 yen one way. This is the room after that one. How a price appears, how hard a wording lands, how many options are on the shelf. Each takes seconds, and after you choose you are shown what was going on. Reading happens on the landing page; doing happens here.
This is not a personality test. Nothing is saved and nothing is sent, and a tendency is not a law. Station D — the 200-yen experiment — is the same one that appears on the landing page, shown again here.
The amounts in these stations stay in yen. They are the same figures used in the chapter, and converting them would move the numbers every time the exchange rate moved — which would get in the way of an experiment about the same amount being worth different things.
Layer IITake partPROCESS
From here you are a reader and a participant at the same time. What goes down the line is your own judgement.
Sec.04 — Stations A–D
Stop reading for a moment, and choose.
Choosing once yourself is faster than reading an explanation of it. There are four stations. Each takes seconds. After you choose, you are told what was going on. You are also free to read past them without choosing anything.
Nothing is submitted and nothing is saved. No request is made. Your choices exist only inside this tab, and reloading the page erases them.
The same ten hours, said two ways
Not yetA
You get ten hours a year back.
B
Without it, you lose ten hours again next year.
Same tool, same ten hours, and both sentences are true.
Choose, and the explanation appears below.
Choose from twelve, or from three
Not yetPick one item on either shelf and the explanation appears below. You can switch shelves and try both.
How to spend 200 yen
Not yetI would rather you did not file reciprocity away as a technique where a free extra buys you a repeat customer. There is a more interesting question here. Actually choose.
Station D / how to spend 200 yenBudget ¥200
- Product
- A special seasoning that makes a plain meal good
- Price
- ¥5,000
- Extra budget
- ¥200, yours to spend on the customer however you like
How would you spend that 200?
Pick one of A, B or C. You can change your mind.
Reveal / what that was
If you picked C, what the seller bought with that 200 was not a cracker. It was the customer’s search time, their hesitation, the trip to the shop, the hunt on the shelf and the chance of getting it wrong, all absorbed in advance. Cost and value are not the same thing.
The same 200 dissolves into the price as a discount and stays in the memory as a gift, because they land in different accounts in the buyer's head. That is called mental accounting.
Raising value = add the positive + subtract the negative.
Applying it is not hard. For coffee beans, one card: 15 g of this one, 240 ml of water, about three minutes. For clothes, how to wash this fabric the first time. For an information product, not another fifty pages, but one page saying: today, just do this. The cost is close to nothing, and it removes both the searching and the chance of getting it wrong.
Sec.05 — What just happened
This page did not only explain things.
Anchoring, framing and loss aversion, choice overload, mental accounting, friction, peak–end. You did not read about them as commentary; you went through them first. And then this page told you what it had been doing.
- Station A¥24,000 was put down before ¥9,800 was shown. Build the reference first, then show the price. Both are numbers for an invented course, and neither has anything to do with the price of this chapter.
- Station BThe same ten hours were set out as a gain and as a loss. Both are facts; only the force differs.
- Station CA twelve-item shelf next to a three-item shelf. That is the exchange rate between freedom and the friction of deciding.
- Station DThe same 200 split between a discount, a gift and a shortened experience. Mental accounting.
- Station EFurther down, you put your own raw material in. Leaving it untouched is fine too.
Stations completed: 0 of 5
The page as a whole is built the same way. No sign-up and no email field is asked for, in order to leave no friction in the way. A question is put at the top and one line is left at the bottom, because what is strongest and what comes last are what tend to be remembered — the peak–end tendency.
Use it, then show your working.
These are tendencies that often hold, not laws that always do. They also come from different places: reciprocity and social proof are social psychology, while anchoring, loss aversion and mental accounting sit closer to behavioural economics. Selling them as one discipline would be inaccurate, so they are laid out here as a toolbox instead.
Layer IIIBuildOUTPUT
Up to here the material was mine. From here your material goes on the line.
Sec.10 — Station E
Feed in your own raw material.
Four fields. Do not try to write them well. Single words work, and so does a half-finished sentence. What comes out is not a finished product but a product seed.
What you type is handled inside this tab only. Nothing is submitted, nothing is stored, no request is made, and no AI is involved. Your words are being slotted into a fixed pattern. You are not asked for a price yet.
FACTORY OUTPUTProduct seed
Waiting for input. Fill in the four fields and press "Put it on the line", and the product seed comes out here.
It is normal for that line to still be too wide, or slightly out of focus. That is what a seed is. Narrowing it one notch at a time — whose situation, which moment — is what settles the shape of the product and its price.