Wang Xiang
On the day of "Double 11", I placed an order to buy a pair of pants and received it three days later. The price of more than two hundred yuan is really not expensive, and it is ok to wear, but I still refunded it. Therefore, I have contributed to the tide of returns that will return after "Double 11" every year.
When I bought these pants, of course, I thought it was not bad, the price and quality were appropriate, why did I still decide to return it? If you think about it, there are probably several reasons:
First, when I looked at the pants, the price was 218, but I didn't buy them at that time, and by the time I bought them, it had become 238. Although there is still a discount compared to the original price, I always feel unhappy in my heart.
Why am I willing to spend more than two hundred dollars on a pair of pants, but I am not happy about the "loss" of 20 yuan? Nobel laureate and behavioral economist Richard Thaler's distinction between "gain utility" and "transaction utility" can help us understand this question. The so-called utility can be understood as the value of the commodity we buy, and the transaction utility is determined by the comparison between the price of the commodity we buy and the reference price, in other words, the satisfaction brought by "picking up the cheap". These pants did give me utility, but since I didn't pick up the 20 dollars cheap, I lost the utility of the transaction, which is why I was sullen.
Some merchants will raise and then reduce the price during the big promotion, and some shopping platforms will prompt you how much the price of a certain product is lower than when you are concerned, all of which are to increase the utility of our transactions.
Second, the pants weren't what I wanted the most, and the one I really wanted had no discounts.
Before "Double 11", I tried to control my desire to shop, adding what I had always wanted to buy to the shopping cart without paying, just to wait for promotions. On this day, I found that the things I wanted to buy the most were not discounted. This is the phenomenon that the Nobel laureate economist George Akerlof has studied in which "bad money drives out good money." Akerlov uses the used car market as an example, because buyers can't tell whether a used car is a good or bad car, so they are only willing to pay a price between a good car and a bad car. As a result, the sellers who own good cars are reluctant to sell them, and the last leftovers in the used car market are bad cars.
Back to the "double 11" promotion example, when all goods are in promotion, buyers pay more attention to the price than the product itself, coupled with the information asymmetry brought by online transactions, so buyers are only willing to buy those relatively cheap things, so many merchants who really sell good things are not willing to participate in the promotion.
On the day of "Double 11", I happened to have dinner with friends. A friend asked, "19 yuan 8 buy 5 pairs of socks, 50 yuan 5 pairs of socks, which one should I buy?" Everyone said in unison: "Buy cheap!" In my shopping cart, those expensive foreign wines and high-end digital products have not dropped in price at all, which is the result of "bad money expelling good money". The pants that I returned today will presumably participate in the next big promotion, and I can only continue to hope that the pants I want more will one day reduce the price.
Third, I bought these pants to make up my mind.
Economist Alfred Marshall and others proposed the theory of marginal utility: the more goods people consume of the same kind, the less utility they add for each additional unit of consumption. And the economist Dan Ariely, in his book Grotesque Behavior, points out that the pain of wallet deflation caused by payments also has a diminishing marginal utility (of course, negative), and our sensitivity to this pain decreases as the amount of payment increases.
The reason is very simple, but it is very interesting to use in real life. Why do merchants prefer to use "full discounts" instead of direct discounts? Because they know the principle of diminishing marginal utility, the more consumers buy, the weaker their sense of pain about the price. So they set up a certain amount of money to get a discount, thereby increasing sales. Of course, consumers also have a way to deal with it, that is, to first make up enough to reduce the amount needed, and then return the things that they don't need so much.
Fourth, the pants were not received until three days after I placed my order.
Obviously, I'm not in a hurry to wear these pants, so why don't I want them later? Economists such as Dan Airry have found that people's behavior is influenced by "Present Bias," which means that people are prone to making irrational decisions for the sake of immediate pleasure. For example, buy something you don't need for an immediate offer and then regret it one day in the future. And since the pants were delivered three days later, the influence of "instant tendency" on me was already very weak, so I rationally chose to return it.
In recent years, more and more e-commerce companies have begun to speed up their delivery speed, from "next-day delivery" to "one-day delivery" to "half-day delivery", which is to continue the impact of "instant tendency" and reduce the chances of our regret.
Fifth, I bought return shipping insurance.
First of all, why do I buy freight insurance? Nobel laureate economists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky's "prospect theory" can be explained. Simply put, people tend to have a risk appetite (e.g., buying a lottery ticket) when faced with a large gain with a small probability, while when faced with a large loss with the same small probability, people tend to be risk-averse (e.g., buy insurance). So, to avoid the risk of wasting hundreds of dollars on buying inappropriate clothes, I bought a few dollars for freight insurance.
Secondly, why do I use freight insurance? The freight for the return is 12 yuan, while the freight insurance can only pay 10 yuan, I need to pay two dollars more. But I decided to return it, because freight insurance was spent in vain if it was not used, and although it was only a few dollars, it still had a Sunk Cost Effects, that is, if we had already paid for something, then we would have a greater probability of using it, that is, the mentality of avoiding waste was at work.
Of course, I decided to return the goods to avoid more than two hundred dollars becoming a sunk cost, so the return is wise. However, the sunk cost effect in real life often brings us greater losses. For example, knowing that the boyfriend is a scumbag, but still choose to endure, otherwise the past payment to him will be wasted; knowing that eating too much is unhealthy, the buffet still has to eat to support, otherwise the money will be spent in vain.
Most of the views of the economists above come from the popular book "What is the use of economics?" by the British scholar Tejvan Pettinger. 》。 In addition to the problems of consumption, there are many more connections between economics and our daily lives. For example, the question posed in the book: Should I risk being fined for parking illegally? Is it necessary to turn off the lights casually? Should I give up a stable job to start my own business? How can I get a higher return on my investment than the market average?
Padinger does not give definitive answers to these questions, but offers us different ways of explaining them from the ideas of different economists, as the author points out at the beginning: "If there is one thing that makes economists agree, it is that everyone realizes that there is always a different point of view." ”
In short, returning or not returning the goods is entirely up to you. Economics, like all social sciences, is a study of human society, but it can neither predict nor guide but can only try to explain social phenomena. Even explanations can only be justified and cannot be conclusive, after all, any theory is pale compared with human subjectivity. Just as the poet Li Bai said more than a thousand years ago, "Life must be full of joy", and Keynes, the most famous economist of the 20th century, also said, "My biggest regret is that I did not drink more champagne."
(The author Wang Xiang is a researcher, assistant director and doctor of management at the Digital and Mobile Governance Laboratory of Fudan University, whose main research directions are public governance in the digital age and human resource management in the public sector.) ）
This issue is edited by Zhou Yuhua