Anchors, Bundling and Un-bundling
Back in 2011, when the New York Times decided to start charging for access to its online content, everyone wondered: how could that possibly work? If most other news sites were free, who would pay for this one site alone? Another issue comes from behavioral economics, the branch of economics that is based on the obvious fact that humans aren’t rational most of the time. Let Dan Ariely explain the problem of “anchors” : “The main problem of this approach is that over the years of free access, the New York Times has trained its readers for years that the right price (or the Anchor) is $0 – and since this is the starting point it is very hard to change it.” So then was the New York Times doomed to fail? Not necessarily, said Ariely: “The trick with anchoring is that although we are not willing to pay more for the same thing, we are willing to pay more for different things. What this means is that one approach that the New York Times could take is to present us with a new ex...