The psychology is fascinating. I would have thought that $1 feels smaller than $0.99. Two nines feels heavy. But despite what my mom would say, I’m surely wrong if everyone else is doing it.
I never found a solution, but one idea was to scale competing products to a range of, say, 13 through 17. That will never cross any round number boundaries and one also can't use shortcuts like "it's essentially a tenner". I think that's when I discovered that it's very often down to two options and that anything scaled down to a range of 13 and 17 will turn into... 13 and 17! Surprise! I was not the smartest teenager.
Have you, or has anyone else reading this ever noticed this or given it thought, or even found a workable approach?
So, the $0.99 feels like costing 0.
Our mind is a superposition of intuitive sense and reason, so even when we can reason that they're very close in price, our intuitive sense still plays into our decision-making. That's my theory anyways.