What if it was one dollar instead of five? It would have saved hundreds of thousands for Randstad. Or if google is paying for it and this feature motivates 1% more people to buy the phone, they could be making a lot of money. I bet loads of homeless would be fine with $1 for a snapshot. How does the outcome differ for all these homeless people in this case?
What if they could have bargained for $10 or even more instead? I don’t think either company would even blink at the sum, but many desperate people out there would be a lot better off.
I agree with you that some observers are never going to be satisfied and to them there’s always more an individual or a company can do. There is definitely an observer effect.
Similarly, If we took my line of questioning all the way to an absurd extreme, the best outcome would be if all these people got permanent shelter, jobs, and a stable life. But we can’t expect companies with profit targets to do this them. Nobody would feel bad about this exchange, but it would be pretty unrealistic.
So i guess I need to reframe my original question. Why do certain exchanges feel ok while other ones leave a sour taste in everybody’s mouth?
To me it seems like the answer is because the exchange felt unfair. Both parties stand to benefit but, instead of doing something genuinely beneficial for both, the party in power offered the (almost) bare minimum. That sense of unfairness is multiplied when you contextualize the exchange as Very Large Business vs. Small Homeless Person.
Similarly the link to the phenomenon discusses our role as observers, but it doesn’t discuss the parties’ roles in the exchanges. They’re not only observers, they’re also actors. The people performing the homeless study could, for example offered something to the control group at the completion of the experiment.