We all have the experience of bargaining in life, and many people are happy to bargain when shopping, not only to buy what they like, but also to experience the satisfaction of bargaining success in a bit of rhetoric, which can be described as a material and spiritual double harvest. However, what is strange is that when people bargain, what they are most afraid of is often not the boss's refusal, but the boss's "promise".
Just imagine, you fancy a beautiful dress, but the price is 500 yuan, which exceeds your psychological expectations, so you grit your teeth and ask the boss "200 yuan is not for sale", but I didn't expect the boss to sell it to you without thinking about it, do you regret it immediately? Promised so happily, is it okay to cut it to 150 yuan? For the next three days, you'll probably be wondering how much the dress is worth.
From an economic point of view, bargaining is actually a kind of negotiation, that is, the parties involved solve the problem of benefit distribution through negotiation, which is a classic problem of game theory. Almost all transactions involve bargaining. For example, when two companies cooperate, the agreement on the terms of the contract requires bargaining; Young people are also bargaining when they go to interview for job hunts and negotiate salary with companies; The team leader schedules the work, the employee wants to adjust the task, or the bargain ......No matter what kind of bargaining it is, when you encounter the other party who just put forward the conditions and "say yes", your heart will be a little drumming.
The premise of bargaining is information asymmetry, and if one party is still in a state of information asymmetry when the negotiations are concluded and a deal is reached, there will be frustration. Take the above buying clothes as an example, you don't know the boss's psychological floor price, and the boss doesn't know your psychological expectations, and the two parties gradually find out each other's bottom line in your back and forth, until one party confirms that the other party will never give in again, and then the transaction is realized. The typical scenario is: after some tugging, you will pretend that you don't want to, turn around and want to leave; The boss will accurately say at the last moment, "Take it, take it, see if you really want it, and I won't sell you a penny." In fact, both parties understood in their hearts that the other party was "acting", but because after that pull, they both thought that they had found out the bottom line of the other party, and the deal was happily concluded. And if you cut out the first "knife", the boss will readily "agree", and you will definitely think that this is not the boss's psychological bottom line. Any store owner with a little experience would not make such a low-level mistake.
There are two important factors that affect the outcome of a bargain. One is the patience of the negotiators. The greater one's patience, the greater the advantage one will have in negotiations. Whoever is more anxious to get a deal will be more likely to compromise and compromise. If you really like that outfit and happen to have an important date to wear soon, will it be easier to accept**? If it's the first business to open, and the boss wants to get a lottery, then it will be easier for him to give in. The second is the bargaining chips in the hands of negotiators. Whoever has more chips in his hand has an advantage. If you go shopping with 3 colleagues and tell your boss that you plan to buy one piece each, and "negotiate to buy 4 pieces at once" is the chip in your hand, the boss is willing to give more price.
From the perspective of pricing strategy, bargaining is "watching people put dishes on the plate", one price per person. At the same time, the merchant can decide for himself that once it is lower than his reserve price, he will refuse to close the deal. In reality, there will always be some people who bargain and close the deal higher than this reserve price, so through this pricing method, merchants can get more profits. But have you noticed, big brands, big shopping malls generally don't allow bargaining. A pricing strategy that benefits merchants, why don't they use it?
The reasons for this are complex, and there are two main ones, which are easy to understand when you hear them: First, once big brands are allowed to bargain, it is difficult to maintain information asymmetry. A brand of clothes with a price of 500 yuan, thousands of counters across the country are sold at the same time, today this mall sold 200 yuan, tomorrow the mall sold the floor price of 150 yuan, the actual transaction price is soon transparent, this dress can no longer be higher than the reserve price**. And the small shop you usually bargain for sells niche brands, that is, "non-standard" products, and the actual transaction price is not transparent because there is no way to compare, and the boss's reserve price will not be exposed. Second, merchants are considering costs. Under the bargain, it will take a long time to reach each transaction, and the large shopping mall has a large number of customers, and the salesperson at the counter is likely to miss other customers, that is, the opportunity cost is relatively high. In addition, bargaining requires skills, unified training for sales staff in advance, and beware of sales staff fraud ** "discretionary" part, etc., management costs will be greatly increased. Therefore, in general, large brands and shopping malls adopt a relatively simple unified pricing and clear discount strategy.
In life, we will also encounter another pricing strategy of "watching people put dishes", that is, some e-commerce platforms use big data to "kill ripe". Why can we accept the street shop "watching people put down dishes", but we can't accept the e-commerce platform "thousands of people and thousands of faces", according to personal consumption habits to customize the exclusive**? Because the former is the result of equal negotiations, and the latter is the result of using information asymmetry to "deceive" you. So, why don't we worry about the "ripeness" of the street shop? Generally, when a customer visits, the boss will directly say the reserve price, saving the process of bargaining, and the customer will not worry about the boss cheating him. This is due to the fact that the two parties have formed a relationship of trust over a long period of time. Compared with customer acquisition on e-commerce platforms**, it is not easy for a small store to gain a loyal long-term customer. Once the boss deceives the old customers, it will lead to the corruption of the reputation of the small store in the surrounding area, and this impact is fatal. It is this endogenous reward and punishment mechanism in the market that allows us to choose trust, thereby reducing transaction costs.
In fact, while lowering the threshold for e-commerce platforms to acquire customers, the Internet has also expanded the spread radius of negative word-of-mouth and accelerated the spread of negative word-of-mouth. (Author: Wan Jianmin **Economy**).
*:Economy**.