The Economist once sold subscriptions through a page that looked like a typo. Web only: $59 a year. Print only: $125 a year. Print plus web: also $125 a year.
Dan Ariely found it while browsing, and instead of shrugging he took it to 100 students at MIT's Sloan School of Management, as he tells it in his 2008 book Predictably Irrational. Sixteen chose web only. Eighty-four chose the print and web bundle. Zero chose print only - exactly what you would predict, because the bundle cost the same as print alone and threw in the website.
Then he deleted the middle line and put the two remaining options in front of 100 students. This time 68 chose web only and 32 chose the bundle. Same products, same prices, same campus. Removing an option that nobody picked took the bundle from 84 percent of the room to 32.
Count the choices in dollars. The three-line menu's picks add up to 16 times $59 plus 84 times $125: $11,444. The two-line menu's add up to 68 times $59 plus 32 times $125: $8,012. A line with a zero percent take rate was worth $3,432 per hundred choosers. The menu with the dead option in it earned 43 percent more.
Here is the most useful thing I know about pricing, so let me say it plainly. Nobody evaluates an offer in isolation. I cannot tell you what a year of one print magazine is worth in the abstract, and neither can you. What we can all do instantly is compare. Print only at $125 sitting next to print plus web at $125 turns an impossible judgment - what is this worth? - into a trivial one: which of these is better? The dead line was never really an offer. It was information. Behavioral economists call the arrangement asymmetric dominance, and the dry name hides something with a live current in it: you can hand people the exact comparison that decides their choice.
The comparison is the product
Once you see this you cannot unsee it. The $60 steak exists to make the $34 chicken look sensible. The premium tier most software companies ship sells little and justifies the middle plan's price tag. A dealership keeps a car on the floor at an insulting price because the one parked next to it now reads as a bargain.
Marketers call the dead line a decoy, and the word carries a whiff of trickery that I think undersells the mechanism. A price is never read alone. It is read against whatever sits beside it - the other plans on the page, the other cars on the lot, the number that came before it in the sentence. The context around a price is a design surface, exactly as much as the price itself, and most businesses leave theirs to chance. They agonize over the number and accept the neighborhood as weather.
Where I stop cheering
The decoy has a seamy half, and I want to be honest about it. A fake third option - a plan nobody researched, priced to lose on purpose - is thin ice. Readers can feel a menu that insults them, and a reader who feels played does not come back for the thing you actually wanted to sell. My own rule: never add an option I would be embarrassed to have chosen. If the bundle really is the best deal for most readers, the dead line beside it is honest signage. If the bundle is a dud, no decoy saves it for long, because the trick works once.
What I like about the principle is how cheap it is to test. Ariely's whole experiment was a printed ad and two batches of students. You already own the materials: your pricing page, and the people who land on it. Most teams have never once rearranged the options around their price. They A/B test the hero headline for weeks and leave the shelf in whatever order engineering happened to build it. The test costs an afternoon: write the menu both ways, show each version to a handful of real prospects, count what they pick. The flip, when it comes, is usually bigger than any wording change you were planning to ship.
The shelf you actually control
I think about this every day at Bid Spotlight, because a paid-rank board is nothing but context. When you claim a spot, your bid decides which listings sit next to yours - position on the board is bought with money, not awarded by an algorithm's opinion of you. As I write this, the minimum bid is a dollar and the current window closes December 1, and the submission form even lets you leave the amount blank and set your exact number at checkout, after your site passes screening. You cannot choose your neighbors' prices. What you fully control is your own menu: your listing's title and tagline, and the page a reader lands on after the click, where your plans and prices stand in an order you either chose deliberately or never thought about at all.
That is the whole lesson of the $125 line that sold nothing. The number on the tag matters less than the shape of the shelf it stands on, and the shelf is yours to build. If your product belongs where comparison happens, claim a spot at bidspotlight.com/submit - and build the page it points to like the menu you want it read as.