Free stuff makes us irrational

Free shipping from larger companies started to change the mentality of many buyers. It was now expected that you too could / should offer free shipping, while maintaining low prices. Of course, small sellers like me don't have the economy of scale to offer such things, without jacking the price considerably.

My second observation was that dealing with the "free" demographics was such a hassle, it is almost never worth it. People that are bargain hunters tend to be more demanding, and for some reason have higher expectations. The only disputes I EVER had, were with those kind of buyers - on extremely cheap items (think under $5). I even got into disputes with people over freebies - i.e. I sent them some free stuff, and they didn't like those.

So on quitting this all together, I figured out that if you're gonna be a small-volume seller, you're better off focusing on the premium / quality segment. It's extremely difficult to compete against amazon on price and shipping.

At some point I realized all of that was actually not something I wanted. I didn't need branded pens. I was not going to actually wear the t-shirts. I likely didn't have time or care about the magazines.

It switched to collecting nothing. At most if I see something I think I'm interested in instead of taking a flier I'll take a picture and look it up later. I don't take any free swag. There might be some exception but it would have to be pretty exceptional. I might initially feel a desire for the free stuff but then I think "Am I really going to use/wear/look at this?" The answer is pretty much always "no" so I leave it.

It’s really a weirdly effective motivator, at least for me.

...participants were asked to choose one of the following:

A free Hershey’s Kiss

A $0.13 Lindt truffle (a superior product in quality that retails for multiples more than a Hershey’s Kiss)

Well obviously, I'm getting a free thing as a no-brainer, and then I also decide whether I want the paid thing or not.

They seem to be oblivious to transaction costs. What if they offered free candy after the e-mail confirmation, but the paid truffle no strings attached?

Or, to rephrase, if free-seeking is such a powerful effect, then evolution must’ve intended our brains to work this way. Thus suggesting that, while the effect creates individual decisions that are economically irrational, over the long term it must be a survival benefit.

There’s a lot of ways this could work (and I’m eager to hear HNers speculate) but one that springs to mind is thinking in terms of risk as cost.

Imagine you must choose getting great fruit by climbing a slightly unsafe tree, or eating mediocre fruit on the ground in front of you. Over the long term evolution should favor the creature that eats the no-risk ground fruit over even the very low risk climb. Taking ZERO unnecessary risk would be favored, because even the tiniest risks are survival filters over evolutionary time scales.

For prices this low - it's not about the price - it's about the hassle of paying.

I'd probably buy much more unneeded stuff if I was walking past a stand of products on the street and could just take what I wanted and it would magically get paid for by me without any need of interaction.

Which explains why politicians are always promising a free lunch.

Science around rational choices often tends to be premised by bizarre theories about what is obviously rational. People take free stuff because it often costs them nothing if it turns out to be a mistake. I can throw a free piece of chocolate in the trash if I don't like it. Throwing a 13¢ piece of chocolate away is like throwing away 13¢. This fake effect would disappear if you were given the choice between a free thing with no resale value and a cheap thing with high resale value, because the cheap thing now becomes profitable to throw away (or in this case sell.)

Also, the specifics about chocolate: I've never had a Lindt chocolate, I've had a Hershey's Kiss (they outsell Lindt in the US by multiple orders of magnitude.) I have no idea whether they're more expensive because they're better, or even because they're more expensive to manufacture or the chocolate is of higher quality grade - they could be more expensive because of the packaging. The fancy thing is often worse ("for a more refined palate") than the cheap thing. The Lindt is a risk that the Hershey's is not.

I'm going to skip free shipping, because, again, out of context it's difficult to evaluate the current value of products one hasn't bought recently. It's far easier to evaluate shipping costs. Also, shipping costs swamp other considerations when buying small, inexpensive things, which are most people's purchases. Also, this is a dumb survey ranking public concerns, and as always being used as a proxy for importance. [edit: just looked closer at the list of concerns they ranked free shipping above. They're all objectively worth less than free shipping to someone not in a hurry.]

The last (and the goal of the article) is the goofy attempt to transfer this badly argued effect to the consumption of online news. I read tons of online news that is awful, and is written by people who are bad, financed by other people who are bad. I wish I could take money away from them. I might be reading it to see what bad people are thinking, or I might even be reading it because I was suckered in by a deceptive or vague headline. While I want to know what bad people are thinking, I don't want to pay them for the privilege. Linkbait headlines steal my time and energy, and I not only don't want to pay them, I wish I could fine them.

Those are made with materials, they're consumed, and they're worn/gone.

>Free digital goods in cyberspace

We've entered a different world. Our old model breaks down. Here, things are copied, pasted, transmitted, and stored for negligible cost. When they're consumed, they remain. For software, there's an extra dimension of totalitarianism: a burger in meatspace (for now) doesn't scan your saliva and send the data back to the restaurant or receive an OTA update and transform into a hotdog mid-chew or dictate how and when you eat it. Here, the economic dynamics and tyrannies of meatspace (scarcity, wear-and-tear, cost of materials) can only be implemented with hacks (DRM, perpetual renting, etc., none of which ultimately work to fully simulate meatspace's mechanics of "when you eat a burger, you can't eat it again").

Free digital content has downsides, sure, but good luck making it not free. In cyberspace, it's information, and information wants to be free.

"Rational" often describes higher-level decision making. Here it is used to in reference simply to outcomes.

If my underlying emotional circuitry rewards me with more units of pleasure for doing x and "experiencing pleasure" is a core motivation then it's a rational decision to do x.

Now - the outcome might be "irrational" when viewed as a whole but it doesn't make sense that way unless there's another external goal. Eating chocolates doesn't have any goal other than pleasure so the Lindt/Hersheys example is rational either way.

It's quite common to use these kind of analyses to imply people are stupid or irrational or both in terms of many kinds of choices but it doesn't hold water unless you own up to the implied external goal you are covertly slipping in to the discussion.

It would be interesting if the article had more research on what the emotions of users when they come across a paywall. For example, I get irrationally upset when I see a paywall, even though I logically know that content writers deserve to be paid.

The fact that less than 20% of Americans will pay for news almost certainly makes the subscriptions more expensive for the percentage of users who will actually pay. Does the price affect how upset someone gets? I know for me, I don't even look at the price, I never intended on paying since I've been conditioned to expect articles to be free.

I would never take the Hershey's Kiss because of the foul vomity taste/smell.

I can't eat regular Hershey chocolate unless it's mixed with something else to mask the smell and acidity.

I would happily take 10 Lindt truffles for $1.30. Though I really just like the various bars.

Even just for lens, imagine telling someone in the 90s that we'd get a free app that lets you take a picture, whooshes it off to some server and uses AI to tell you "what that thing is" along with providing instant access to Google's knowledge related to that "thing". For free!

People are so self-entitled. Yes, companies sometimes make bad decisions around free products, but for many of Google's offerings (and other free service from other companies) _they're the only ones offering it, it wouldn't exist otherwise_

I looked at newspaper circulation data from the 00s in Melbourne[1], and it seems the same was true back then. Looking at 2005, for example, The Herald Sun and The Age (which for all intents and purposes were 100% of the newspaper market) sold a combined 700k issues each weekday, out of a population of 3.5m.

Perhaps the phenomenon here is more about 80% of people getting their news through friends, family, co-workers and other social connections rather than subscribing to a professionally edited news source.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_in_Australi...

An old lottery name was changed from Super 7 to Lottomax and old promotional supplies had to be trashed. There were piles of cheap thin pens that had big 7 as part of the pen at the top.

We casually gave them out at the casino but them it happened. People freaked out and wanted a dozen. "Can I get two more for my grandchildren" and "Can we have more than one!". It was nuts.

That jogged my memory I recall now we also had free pens at the player's counter where people could sign up for a loyalty card. So it wasn't like free pens were unusual. Maybe the loyalty program registered as a cost in people's minds.

Markets for everything and everything for a price - those things are probably driving the irrational behavior.

We just don't see that pressure because we're in that system. We're acclimated.

Finally I set it to free and my Neightbor scooped it up instantly.

The crazy thing is he was so excited about it and got so much use out of it,

I always wondered why didn’t he just buy it for $10.

While I don't work with any of our branding team/activities much, our generalist support team was moved under my purview and all issues related to giveaways or brand events come through the support team (their main duties are related to stuff like account management, issues with the public site, licensing management, etc).

The absolutely awful statements and behaviors from persons who didn't get stuff like a free T-Shirt for participating in an event is astounding, and it's a truly global phenomenon, as users from probably 30+ countries have needed management level intervention to tell them basically "knock that shit off you're an adult and this is about a T-Shirt" fairly frequently. They are very openly offensive towards my generalist staff when the staff try to explain stuff like "the distributor is based in N country, moving it to Y country is still heavily delayed due to the world situation right now" (e.g., COVID, war, etc).

But the common response is "I don't care, this is _MY_ t-shirt and you owe it to me", and they spam and harass multiple times a week for weeks on end. It's really difficult to deal with because I've not been clever enough to figure out how to appeal to any sense of patience and most of the times just issue an ultimatum email of "Stop spamming or I'll cancel the order entirely." This is after they're given items like tracking numbers so they themselves can see that the stuff is just caught up in the system or being told that we are waiting for the next batch of swag to be branded and shipped to us.

Overwhelmingly though, the idea presented is that "It's mine, I'm _legally_ entitled to it, you are doing something illegal by not giving it to me right now", and so far I've not been able to come up with a way that shakes this mentality and stops the abhorrent behavior. (Truly, some of the things they say are absolutely outrageous and offensive towards my generalist staff)

With our free product, we get a lot of the same behavior too, but at least this one I understand because it's either:

1. Company found out our free edition works great for their setup so no need to buy a paid license, but since free has no support guarantee, if there is an issue they're out of luck unless we happen to have spare bandwidth on the Support side, which since COVID began has been rare. (I'm 200% for don't pay if you don't need to and I'm glad the product is so good the limited free edition works for them! I don't want to sell anything cause I'm not a sales person)

2. Small MSPs/Providers get pissed when they sell the Free edition (against our EULA very explicitly) and then realize that if something happens in their client environment, we won't support it

For these cases at least the motivation feels a bit stronger to me. (one is just feeling trapped without support, the latter is having to face the reality they're breaking EULA and they built their business on a not-legal premise and might have to admit to their clients they've been charging them for a free product) I absolutely get _where_ the frustration comes from and where the entitlement is based on since there's a bit more at stake. But compared to "where's my sticker collection you promised!?", I even feel sympathy towards the free-edition users because probably it is pretty stressful and scary.

Ultimately Free does give a sense of entitlement; people think they should get exactly what they imagine in their mind and by that point it's not something they might get, it's their property that you're denying. It's honestly extremely depressing to deal with such issues and explain to persons with tons of accolades and technical acumen that "you can't treat people like shit just because you didn't get a T-Shirt" and that it really isn't theirs until its in their hands.

Addendum edit: The less said about Twitter/reddit facilitating such complaints the better. Absolutely awful media, and while sometimes there are some voices of reason in the mob, the majority bandwagon and just exacerbate the issue, which gets the social media team in a tizzy as they also aren't equipped to explain such situations or crowd-control the threads.