" it is the continuous thread of revelation"

Maria Popova deu-me a conhecer este precioso trecho de Eudora Wilty:

"The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order, a timetable not necessarily — perhaps not possibly — chronological. The time as we know it subjectively is often the chronology that stories and novels follow: it is the continuous thread of revelation."

Que junto a este outro de Daniel Kahneman:

"I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me." 

E à metáfora de Argo.

Se o futuro fosse conhecido bastava planeá-lo e seguir o plano, mas o futuro é o reino da incerteza, é a Terra Incognita. Claro que temos de planear, e eu sou um fanático do planeamento, mas não chega, há que deixar algum espaço para a serendipidade. Uma directora de turma estava-me sempre a dizer que o meu filho mais novo precisava de passar menos tempo em frente ao PC (a ver séries e outros vídeos, acrescento eu) nunca o proibi, nem me recordo de o ter alguma vez mencionado. Hoje, ele estuda Cinema.

Quando o mundo muda, quando o futuro sofre um corte abrupto, a serendipidade pode-nos fornecer matéria-prima para vivermos uma "nova oportunidade, num nível diferente do jogo da nossa vida", ou seja, "as pedras que a vida nos vai dando são os materiais de construção com que vamos montando a realidade do que vamos ser amanhã", a construção do nosso percurso. E só quando a necessidade aperta, ou a oportunidade surge, é que acontece a revelação que vem contextualizar e dar um sentido novo a tudo, aprendi com Randy Pausch, "Be prepared: "luck" is where preparation meets opportunity".

Nada atraente

o Paulo Peres chamou-me a atenção para um artigo que me parece muito bom, "Value-based pricing and cognitive biases: An overview for business markets" de Mario Kienzler e publicado online por Industrial Marketing Management. O artigo lida com 4 vieses cognitivos que afectam a temática do pricing por parte dos agentes económicos.

Mal comecei a ler o artigo apreciei a quantidade de autores que ao longo dos anos li e que agora aparecem num texto sobre pricing. Nomes como: Kahneman, Gigerenzer e Ariely. Depois, quando encontro uma relação entre um tema que há longos anos aqui tenho referido, o locus de controlo, com o pricing, foi ouro sobre azul. 

Vejamos então o primeiro viés cognitivo: A percepção da falta de controlo.

"Proposition 1: The extent of managers' internal (external) LOC is positively (negatively) related to the extent to which firms practice value- based pricing."

Racional para isto?

"Control is an important concept in psychology and sociology, frequently operationalized as a subjective, domain-specific, and outcome- oriented construct related to locus of control (LOC) ... individuals with an external LOC perceive luck, coincidence, or influ-ential others as shaping external events that they must passively bear.
..
Research in psychology has frequently investigated the illusion of control—that is, overestimation of one's perceived control in chance situations. In contrast, perceived lack of control is defined as the tendency to underestimate one's control over events. The evidence suggests that people tend to under- estimate their control in situations where they actually have control.
.
In the context of pricing, perceived lack of control manifests as a subjective perception of managerial control over pricing that leads to a concrete price outcome. As such, a range of evidence suggests that LOC affects managerial pricing practices. More precisely, managers with an external LOC react positively to pricing practices that emphasize cost- or competition-based pricing.
...
many managers believe they have no control over pricing and that “‘we determine our costs and take our industry's traditional margins’ or ‘the market sets the price and we have to figure out how to cope with it.’”
...
entrepreneurs with an external locus of control prefer low-cost strategies—that is, strategies with a focus on costs and low prices.
.
Managers characterized by perceived lack of control over pricing are passive and rely on docile pricing practices such as adding a margin to costs or matching market prices. In contrast, value-based pricing requires managers to actively and confidently influence pricing through their behavior—a view associated with an internal LOC."

Depois destes sublinhados, regresso ao primeiro postal, de 2007, onde mencionei aqui o tema locus de controlo e a duas perguntas que fiz na altura:

"E quando um gestor tem o seu Locus de Controlo no exterior?.
Aparecem-nos comportamentos deste tipo.
Os telejornais, os foruns, os jornais e as antenas abertas, são o palco para quem se queixa dos chineses, esses malvados, ou dos espanhóis, ou dos polacos, ou dos marroquinos, ou dos portuenses, ou dos lisboetas, ou dos bracarenses... a culpa é sempre dos outros.
...
E quando numa comunidade a maioria dos seus membros tem o seu Locus de Controlo no exterior? Nada atraente!!!"

E a sua empresa, também é curiosa?

"And this is my problem with the cognitive sciences and the advice world generally. It’s built on the premise that we are chess masters who make decisions, for good or ill. But when it comes to the really major things we mostly follow our noses. What seems interesting, beautiful, curious and addicting?
.
Have you ever known anybody to turn away from anything they found compulsively engaging?
.
We don’t decide about life; we’re captured by life. In the major spheres, decision-making, when it happens at all, is downstream from curiosity and engagement. If we really want to understand and shape behavior, maybe we should look less at decision-making and more at curiosity. Why are you interested in the things you are interested in? Why are some people zealously seized, manically attentive and compulsively engaged?"

E penso nos fragilistas e nas suas decisões.

Trecho retirado de "Does Decision-Making Matter?"

Ponto da situação

Ontem ao princípio da noite, um desafio do @pauloperes permitiu desenhar esta figura, para sistematizar o nosso progresso:

Um JTBD e vários contextos possíveis (recordar link "Não começar sem saber qual o trabalho e o contexto seleccionado")
.
A unidade de análise é a combinação JTBD e um contexto concreto.
O serviço prestado por uma organização é contratado pelo cliente para realizar um trabalho na sua vida, no âmbito de um certo contexto, para atingir um resultado (outcome).
Falamos de resultado (outcome) como uma consequência na vida do cliente, como um benefício, como uma experiência procurada e valorizada. Não falamos de ouput, não falamos de uma coisa concreta que é transaccionada e que tem especificações independentemente do cliente concreto. O cliente não procura a coisa, o objecto, o produto! O cliente procura o que a coisa faz na sua vida.
A coisa, o objecto, o produto transaccionado, é um recurso processado pelo cliente na sua vida para produzir o benefício, a experiência procurada.
.
Durante esse trabalho o cliente vai sentir resistências e problemas (barreiras). Por exemplo, porque não tem o know-how ou a paciência, para tirar o melhor partido dos recursos que lhe são disponibilizados. A monitorização do progresso, durante a realização do trabalho, pode dar força para seguir em frente, criando uma espécie de espiral de motivação positiva:

"People don’t want just the outcomes; they want the progress outcomes represent."

Recordei os objectivos proximais, para vencer as barreiras.
.
O olhar para trás no fim é o sublinhado a amarelo daqui:

"When you design for outcomes, you’re designing for your customers’s future past — the moment, at some end, when they look back and evaluate."

Como Kahneman e Gigerenzer escrevem, o que recordamos das experiências não é o mesmo que o que sentimos durante a sua vivência inicial. Há aqui qualquer coisa de Damásio?

Falta incluir a co-criação na primeira figura.

"and new situations, in which such intuitions are worthless"

"A firefighter running into a burning building doesn’t have time for even a quick decision tree, yet if he is experienced enough his intuition will often lead him to excellent decisions. Many other fields are similarly conducive to intuition built through years of practice—a minimum of 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to develop true expertise, the psychologist K. Anders Ericsson famously estimated. The fields where this rule best applies tend to be stable. The behavior of tennis balls or violins or even fire won’t suddenly change and render experience invalid.
.
Management isn’t really one of those fields. It’s a mix of situations that repeat themselves, in which experience-based intuitions are invaluable, and new situations, in which such intuitions are worthless. [Moi ici: Recordar "Parte VII – Zapatero e os outros."] It involves projects whose risks and potential returns lend themselves to calculations but also includes groundbreaking endeavors for which calculations are likely to mislead. It is perhaps the profession most in need of multiple decision strategies.
.
Part of the appeal of heuristics-and-biases research is that even if it doesn’t tell you what decision to make, it at least warns you away from ways of thought that are obviously wrong. If being aware of the endowment effect makes you less likely to defend a declining business line rather than invest in a new one, you’ll probably be better off."

Trechos retirados de "From “Economic Man” to Behavioral Economics"

A multidão versus os profissionais

Conciliar "Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman on Why You Shouldn't Trust Your Gut" com "Crowdfunding and Venture Funding: More Alike Than You Think"?
.
Aquele:

"We are seeing more and more evidence-based medicine, as [opposed to] the intuitive model," he says. "In businesses, a lot of at least secondary decisions are increasingly passed on to algorithms. It's the truly important decisions that tend to be driven by intuition."

Num mundo entre o complexo e caótico:

"Do crowds — driven by a herd mentality, crowd euphoria or sheer silliness — gravitate toward funding seemingly irrelevant ideas? Or can crowds make rational funding decisions and, better yet, exceed venture capital investors and other traditional gatekeepers in identifying promising projects?
...
“It turns out the crowd does consider the quality of projects and outcomes pretty well.”" 

Acerca da Grécia e dos custos afundados

Volto a "Thinking, Fast and Slow" a propósito da Grécia:
.
"The sunk-cost fallacy keeps people for too long in poor jobs, unhappy marriages, and unpromising research projects. I have often observed young scientists struggling to salvage a doomed project when they would be better advised to drop it and start a new one. Fortunately, research suggests that at least in some contexts the fallacy can be overcome. The sunk-cost fallacy is identified and taught as a mistake in both economics and business courses, apparently to good effect: there is evidence that graduate students in these fields are more willing than others to walk away from a failing project.
...
The version in which cash was lost leads to more reasonable decisions. It is a better frame because the loss, even if tickets were lost, is “sunk,” and sunk costs should be ignored. History is irrelevant and the only issue that matters is the set of options the theater patron has now, and their likely consequences. Whatever she lost, the relevant fact is that she is less wealthy than she was before she opened her wallet."

Diferenciação, diferenciação, diferenciação

Recordar este postal sobre a convivência pacífica de diferentes espécies no mesmo meio abiótico consumindo diferentes recursos "OMG... e vão viver de quê? (parte VIII) ou Mt 11, 25".
.
Depois, ler este pequeno texto de Scott McKain "Another’s distinction does not prohibit yours" onde se pode ler esta mensagem importante:

"You see, just because another is distinctive within your field does not prohibit you from finding a way to stand out and move up."

 Uma versão ilustrada pode ser esta:

BTW, ler o que se descreve aqui como a "beach theory" e a introdução do capítulo 25 de "Thinking, Fast and Slow":

"One day in the early 1970s, Amos handed me a mimeographed essay by a Swiss economist named Bruno Frey, which discussed the psychological assumptions of economic theory. I vividly remember the color of the cover: dark red. Bruno Frey barely recalls writing the piece, but I can still recite its first sentence: “The agent of economic theory is rational, selfish, and his tastes do not change.” I was astonished. My economist colleagues worked in the building next door, but I had not appreciated the profound difference between our intellectual worlds. To a psychologist, it is self-evident that people are neither fully rational nor completely selfish, and that their tastes are anything but stable. Our two disciplines seemed to be studying different species, which the behavioral economist Richard Thaler later dubbed Econs and Humans. Unlike Econs, the Humans that psychologists know have a System 1. Their view of the world is limited by the information that is available at a given moment (WYSIATI), and therefore they cannot be as consistent and logical as Econs. They are sometimes generous and often willing to contribute to the group to which they are attached. And they often have little idea of what they will like next year or even tomorrow."

PMEs: Cuidado com o que assinam, cuidado com o que se comprometem

Daniel Kahneman no seu livro "Thinking, Fast and Slow" inicia o capítulo 23 "The Outside View" com uma história da sua vida profissional. Um grupo, do qual fazia parte Kahneman, foi constituído para redigir um livro que servisse de texto base para o ensino de boas práticas de julgamento e tomada de decisões.
.
Um ano após terem iniciado as reuniões e terem escrito os textos mais fáceis, alguém pergunto:
.
"- Começamos isto há um ano, o plano prevê que demoremos 2 anos. Quanto é que grupos semelhantes ao nosso costumam demorar?
 - Cerca de 7 anos os que terminam. A taxa de insucesso é de 40%!
 - E somos melhores ou piores que a média desses grupos?
 - Somos um pouco abaixo da média."
.
Depois, o grupo discutiu um pouco acerca desta realidade. Passado alguns minutos retomaram o trabalho... e demoraram 8 anos a terminar o livro.
.
Não é interessante? Ainda para mais sobre um livro acerca do julgamento e da tomada de decisões...
.
Kahneman usa esta história para escrever:

"This embarrassing episode remains one of the most instructive experiences of my professional life. I eventually learned three lessons from it. The first was immediately apparent: I had stumbled onto a distinction between two profoundly different approaches to forecasting, which Amos and I later labeled the inside view and the outside view. The second lesson was that our initial forecasts of about two years for the completion of the project exhibited a planning fallacy. Our estimates were closer to a best-case scenario than to a realistic assessment. I was slower to accept the third lesson, which I call irrational perseverance: the folly we displayed that day in failing to abandon the project. Facing a choice, we gave up rationality rather than give up the enterprise."

Esta preponderância da inside view e este optimismo no planeamento, não prevendo o que pode correr mal, não são problemas portugueses, estão embutidos no nosso ADN. Engraçado, relacionar a ideia de que a economia é uma continuação da biologia, com o título do capítulo 24, o optimismo que anima os humanos, que os leva a sobrevalorizar as suas capacidades e hipóteses pessoais é "The Engine of Capitalism":

"Most of us view the world as more benign than it really is, our own attributes as more favorable than they truly are, and the goals we adopt as more achievable than they are likely to be. We also tend to exaggerate our ability to forecast the future, which fosters optimistic overconfidence. In terms of its consequences for decisions, the optimistic bias may well be the most significant of the cognitive biases. Because optimistic bias can be both a blessing and a risk, you should be both happy and wary if you are temperamentally optimistic."

Escrevo tudo isto por causa da relação com histórias deste tipo "Groupon demand almost finishes cupcake-maker"... esta história é mais comum do que se possa imaginar. Quando uma PME se sente lisonjeada com o convite de uma multinacional para começar a fornecer um produto/serviço... iludida pelas quantidades, iludida pelo "poder dizer que é fornecedor de", iludida pelo desafio de ter as máquinas todas a trabalhar...
.
.
Cuidado!
Cuidado com o que assinam, cuidado com o que se comprometem, cuidado com os investimentos que vão ter de fazer, cuidado com o risco que vão assumir. Façam um desenho, convidem um amigo para vos ouvir e servir de advogado do diabo. Pensem no que pode correr mal, e terminando novamente com Kahneman:

"Organizations may be better able to tame optimism and individuals than individuals are. The best idea for doing so was contributed by Gary Klein, my “adversarial collaborator” who generally defends intuitive decision making against claims of bias and is typically hostile to algorithms. He labels his proposal the premortem. The procedure is simple: when the organization has almost come to an important decision but has not formally committed itself, Klein proposes gathering for a brief session a group of individuals who are knowledgeable about the decision. The premise of the session is a short speech: “Imagine that we are a year into the future. We implemented the plan as it now exists. The outcome was a disaster. Please take 5 to 10 minutes to write a brief history of that disaster.”"

E quem nos protege dos governos?

À atenção de quem acredita que precisamos de governos para tomar conta de nós, para nos proteger dos maus e do mercado esse monstro terrível.

"Os portugueses confiam mais nas empresas do que no Governo. ... A confiança nas empresas, de 54 pontos, supera em 25 a que os portugueses nutrem pelo seu Governo, que é de 29 pontos."

Depois, algo na linha do que Kahneman exemplifica uma e outra vez em "Thinking, Fast and Slow":

"Se, em todos os países estudados, as empresas são mais fiáveis que os governos, 49% dos inquiridos globalmente exigem ao poder político que regule mais os mercados e as próprias empresas."

Somos tão racionais como humanos... confiamos mais nas empresas do que nos governos, depois, pedimos aos governos que nos protejam das empresas... go figure.
.
E quem nos protege dos governos?
.
Um dos capítulos do livro é "Less is More"
.
Trechos retirados de "Portugueses confiam mais nas empresas do que no Governo"

O problema não é étnico... talvez genético

Com Byrnes e Storbacka aprendemos que os empresários portugueses não são os piores do mundo, afinal o resto do mundo comete o mesma falha de não se concentrar nos clientes-alvo. Este trecho de Kahneman devia ser motivo de reflexão para todos nós que comentamos os projectos de construção no nosso país:

.

"In July 1997, the proposed new Scottish Parliament building in Edinburgh was estimated to cost up to £40 million. By June 1999, the budget for the building was £109 million. In April 2000, legislators imposed a £195 million “cap on costs.” By November 2001, they demanded an estimate of “final cost,” which was set at £241 million. That estimated final cost rose twice in 2002, ending the year at £294.6 million. It rose three times more in 2003, reaching £375.8 million by June. The building was finally completed in 2004 at an ultimate cost of roughly £431 million.
.
(Moi ici: Lembram-se das estimativas de utilização do aeromoscas de Beja? E do TGV em Portugal? E do TGV em Espanha?) A 2005 study examined rail projects undertaken worldwide between 1969 and 1998. In more than 90% of the cases, the number of passengers projected to use the system was overestimated. Even though these passenger shortfalls were widely publicized, forecasts did not improve over those thirty years; on average, planners overestimated how many people would use the new rail projects by 106%, and the average cost overrun was 45%. As more evidence accumulated, the experts did not become more reliant on it. In 2002, a survey of American homeowners who had remodeled their kitchens found that, on average, they had expected the job to cost $18,658; in fact, they ended up paying an average of $38,769."

.

Trecho retirado de "Thinking, Fast and Slow" de Daniel Kahneman.

Luzes no meio do oceano de dados

Ao ler este artigo "Toothpaste, toilet paper, white matter, and jam: Clues for better decision making" (a foto do artigo é paradigmática... já imaginaram um estrangeiro a escolher vinho num corredor de um hipermercado português?), ao chegar a este ponto:

"Writers, content producers, and other media have long known that “Top 10″ lists attract eyeballs and attention. People crave simplicity they can digest and manage from an authoritative source.
The typical American makes about 70 decisions per day. 50% of CEO decisions are made in 9 minutes or less, and less than 12% take more than an hour to make.
We collectively spend a alot of time not just trying to gather and analyze information to help inform the decisions we are making, but trying to absorb the information that comes at us unexpectedly, where we are not directing the stream of content."

Fiz logo a ponte para o capítulo 21 "Intuitions vs. Formulas" de "Thinking, Fast and Slow":

"The research suggests a surprising conclusion: to maximize predictive accuracy, final decisions should be left to formulas, especially in low-validity environments. In admission decisions for medical schools, for example, the final determination is often made by the faculty members who interview the candidate. The evidence is fragmentary, but there are solid grounds for a conjecture: conducting an interview is likely to diminish the accuracy of a selection procedure, if the interviewers also make the final admission decisions. Because interviewers are overconfident in their intuitions, they will assign too much weight to their personal impressions and too little weight to other sources of information, lowering validity." 

...

"The important conclusion from this research is that an algorithm that is constructed on the back of an envelope is often good enough to compete with an optimally weighted formula, and certainly good enough to outdo expert judgment. This logic can be applied in many domains, ranging from the selection of stocks by portfolio managers to the choices of medical treatments by doctors or patients." 

É claro que depois destas citações tenho de acrescentar:

"I learned from this finding a lesson that I have never forgotten: intuition adds value even in the justly derided selection interview, but only after a disciplined collection of objective information and disciplined scoring of separate traits."

Satisficers (parte III)

"A solution to a given problem is called optimal if one can prove that no better solution exists. Some skeptics might ask, Why should intuition rely on a rule of thumb instead of the optimal strategy? To solve a problem by optimization—rather than by a rule of thumb—implies both that an optimal solution exists and that a strategy exists to find it. Computers would seem to be the ideal tool for finding the best solution to a problem. Yet paradoxically, the advent of high-speed computers has opened our eyes to the fact that the best strategy often cannot be found."
.
Trecho retirado de "Gut Feelings" de Gerd Gigerenzer.
.
"Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in Economics because he demonstrated conclusively that people do not function according to the hyper-rational, cold calculating benefit maximizing cost minimizing Homo economicus that traditional economic theory presupposes."

.

Trecho retirado de "Kahneman on Well-Being and Domains of Consciousness"

.

"Decision makers often have imperfect information. We develop a choice theoretic experiment to explore choice mistakes that result from incomplete search. Our choice process methodology generates data on how choices change with contemplation time, thereby illuminating the search process. We demonstrate that most subjects behave in line with a reservation-based model of sequential search, altering their reservation utilities in response to the size of the choice set and the complexity of the environment. These …ndings support Simon’s model of satis…cing behavior and suggest simple measures of contextual e¤ects on the quality of decisions."

.

Trecho retirado de "Search and Satis…cing"

.

Tudo o que contribua para a explosão de diversidade é bem vindo... Mongo agradece!!!

Recomendação de leitura

Recomendo à tríade que leia o último livro de Daniel Kahneman.

.

Podem começar por "É inútil"

.

"Before Kahneman and Tversky, people who thought about social problems and human behavior tended to assume that we are mostly rational agents. They assumed that people have control over the most important parts of their own thinking. They assumed that people are basically sensible utility-maximizers and that when they depart from reason it’s because some passion like fear or love has distorted their judgment.

Kahneman and Tversky conducted experiments. They proved that actual human behavior often deviates from the old models and that the flaws are not just in the passions but in the machinery of cognition. They demonstrated that people rely on unconscious biases and rules of thumb to navigate the world, for good and ill. Many of these biases have become famous: priming, framing, loss-aversion."

...

"We are players in a game we don’t understand. Most of our own thinking is below awareness. Fifty years ago, people may have assumed we are captains of our own ships, but, in fact, our behavior is often aroused by context in ways we can’t see. Our biases frequently cause us to want the wrong things. Our perceptions and memories are slippery, especially about our own mental states. Our free will is bounded. We have much less control over ourselves than we thought."

.

E é esta complexidade, incoerência, inconsstência que torna Mongo possível e expande a paisagem competitiva onde todos podemos viver em simultâneo, desde que nunca mais faça sentido um TNT (todos no top) dos anos 80 do século passado. (Porque agora não existe um top, existem dezenas de tops)

Tríade: académicos, políticos e comentadores que só sabem jogar o jogo do "agarra o porco"

Price is over-rated

A leitura do terceiro capítulo "Advanced purchase and the separation of purchase and consumption" de "The Pricing and Revenue Management of Services - A strategic approach" de Irene Ng veio reforçar a minha preocupação com os custos não monetários.
.
"To mitigate valuation risk, firms often offer discounts to entice buyers to purchase, although the service rendered is still the same. Yet, buyers buy because the expectations they place on the benefits of the service is high enough (or the price of the service is low enough, depending on how you wish to see it) that notwithstanding the discount on their willingness to pay due to the valuation risk, the asking price is still worth it. Thus, many service firms don’t realise that the demand could actually be far higher and the willingness-to-pay far greater (i.e. the firm could get a higher price) if the valuation risk could be reduced."
.
Irene Ng vai buscar o trabalho de Kahneman e Tversky ("Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk"; "Using Prospect Theory to Guide Product Management Decisions") para recordar que "buyers’ aversion to loss is greater than their eagerness to acquire gains. Using the example above, the consumer may prefer to walk to the restaurant down the road so as to avoid the risk that he may not find a parking spot at the other restaurant, even if the latter is touted to have better ambience and food compared to the former." e chamar a atenção para:
.
"The cost of increasing a service’s benefits may not yield as much revenue as compared to spending the money to amplify the expected outlay for choosing the alternative. This is because any increase in the expected outlay for going with the competition, will increase the firm’s ENV (expected net value). And by amplifying the risk of choosing the alternative, the increase in a buyer’s ENV for the firm could actually be even higher."
.
A minha conclusão é imediata, muitas empresas, em vez de investirem no aumento dos benefícios da sua oferta deviam apostar primeiro na redução dos riscos não-monetários da mesma oferta.
.
Actualmente ando à procura de um serviço para montar vidros duplos na minha casa, impressiona a quantidade de riscos não-monetários que temos pela frente: quem? garantias? opções? eficácia?
.
Por fim, o capítulo termina em beleza com uma das mensagens-chave deste blogue. Ganhem fôlego, e lembrem-se, não sou eu que o escrevo:
.
"price is over-rated as a reflection of the service’s value or benefit to the buyer. Marketers forget that the price – commonly seen as the ‘economic value’ of their products – is usually severely discounted because of outlays required to buy or consume a product, especially if it’s a service. The key strategic value for decision making is the ENV; how the ENV is affected by the expected benefits and outlays, and the construction of the pricing policy within the framework. The traditional understanding of willingness-to- pay is that price has to be lowered to increase surplus and improve the buyer’s inclination to buy, since the buyer’s willingness to pay cannot be changed for a given product."