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THE LATEST ESSAYFIELD NOTES / Aug 3, 2026 · 15 min
Price fencing: the fence that sorts your customers for you
One price is a compromise nobody asked for: too high for the student, a gift to the procurement department, and usually both mistakes at once. A fence — an objective condition that costs the customer something — lets people sort themselves into price brackets without you ever guessing who is who. Here is what a single price actually costs, why the revenue curve is a lazy hill that hides your mistake, how much each extra fence is worth, what fences are made of, and how leaky a fence can get before it stops earning its keep.
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Showing 2 essays in pricing
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Price fencing: the fence that sorts your customers for you
One price is a compromise nobody asked for: too high for the student, a gift to the procurement department, and usually both mistakes at once. A fence — an objective condition that costs the customer something — lets people sort themselves into price brackets without you ever guessing who is who. Here is what a single price actually costs, why the revenue curve is a lazy hill that hides your mistake, how much each extra fence is worth, what fences are made of, and how leaky a fence can get before it stops earning its keep.
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Van Westendorp: four blunt questions and one elegant X
Ask someone what a thing should cost and you get a shrug. Ask where the edges of acceptable are and they answer with startling consistency — which is the whole trick behind the price sensitivity meter, a method from 1976 that survives on four survey questions and no statistics at all. Here's how forty-eight scattered answers become four smooth curves, why two of them run the other way, where the famous smoothness actually comes from, and why the point labelled 'optimal' is the most dangerous number on the chart.
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