That's a very sharp post, Johnny. I find myself still deciding on a restaurant entree because of a $2 price difference, despite the fact that I am frequently making monetary decisions several orders of magnitude greater than that.
A similar phenomenon is the difficulty that many otherwise good gamblers have in keeping monetary perspective after a gambling trip. In my early days as a blackjack player, I knew my trip EV was only a few hundred dollars. But if I was lucky enough to win a few thousand, it was hard to remember to not start spending more freely. And losing a few thousand wasn't that much different--it's hard to think about saving $5 when you just lost $2000. I think a lot of high level poker players have problems with keeping perspective.
Casinos prey on this, too. Even if there were $5, $25 and $100 coins in circulation, casinos would still favor using chips. People don't treat chips the same as money. People who wouldn't give a restaurant waitress an extra $1 if it pushed the tip to over 20% think nothing of giving a cocktail waitress a $5 chip at a blackjack table.
--Dunbar
---In vpFREE@yahoogroups.com, <vpfree@yahoogroups.com> wrote:
Harry and Jean have gone back and forth on whether the Harrah's fuel program is worth the effort. They are both correct. Harry views the time invested being a reasonable cost for the benefits and Jean does not.
People can funny opinions about the value of an activity and relative savings. Funny to me, anyway. Long , long ago a friend and I went to Las Vegas and were downtown having a drink. This is about 25 years ago so we were paying for airfare, paying (moderately) for hotels and food, etc. One of the places downtown had $0.49 Michelobs and $0.75 Heinekens. I bought the first round, 2 Heinekens, and paid $1.50 for them ( plus tip). My friend got the next round and came back with 2 Michelobs. I asked why he switched and he proudly said "these are $0.26 cheaper". I informed him that you have paid $300 for airfare, another $100 or so for the hotel rooms, $50 - $75 for food and a couple hundred gambling budget and you are worried about $0.26? He gave me a funny look as if to say "well, if you are going to look at it like THAT".
So, people place different values on things. I give away a lot of coupons and most of the time, I don't think the people realize what they have received. These are people who are standing in line at a buffet with a family of four and I give them 2 buy one, get one free offers. They might say thank you and might not. They don't value that as much as handing them $20 ( even though the benefit is the same assume a $10 buffet for simplicity). The net effect is the same. They have $20 more in their pocket but is viewed with as no big deal ( the 2:1 offers) and the other would be viewed much more positively.
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