Anchoring (pricing)
Showing a credible high price first so the price you want to sell is judged against it and feels more reasonable.
See it
What it is
Anchoring is the tendency to judge a number relative to the first salient number you saw. In pricing, a credible $20,000 premium option can make a $12,000 recommendation feel moderate, while the same $12,000 shown alone may feel expensive. Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman showed how little the anchor has to mean in their 1974 Science paper on judgment under uncertainty: they spun a rigged wheel of fortune in front of people, then asked what share of UN member states were African. The group that watched it land on 10 guessed about 25 percent, the group that watched it land on 65 guessed about 45, and everyone had just watched the number come off a wheel.
Reach for it when ordering service packages, proposal options, or a pricing page. Put the genuinely largest scope first, spell out why it costs more, then let the buyer compare the recommended option against that reference. The anchor works best when every price maps to a clear difference in deliverables or value.
Gotcha: an absurd premium tier or a made-up former price reads as a trick. The anchor has to be an option you could actually deliver and would happily sell. If nobody can explain the extra value, the high number makes every option look padded instead of making one look fair.
Ask AI for it
Draft a three-option pricing proposal from the scope below using the anchoring effect. Present the credible premium option first, the recommended option second, and the minimum viable option last. Give each one countable deliverables, exclusions, a fixed price, and a one-sentence reason for the price gap. Then output matching Stripe Price API fields for currency and unit_amount, with unit_amount as an integer in the smallest currency unit (cents for USD, whole yen for JPY). Do not invent a fake discount, former price, or premium feature that is absent from the scope.