Quote from: nanopene on March 11, 2013, 07:45:32 PM

Quote from: pera on March 11, 2013, 12:49:25 AM

I find a bit funny when people put imaginary barriers to the price of btc (*) on their speculations. Why people say $50 instead of 53 or 51.3 or even sqrt(3210)?
It's like they find the 0 positioned into the least significant digit as something relevant...
Maybe some people says 50 as an approximation, but what would you put in your ask price: $97 or $100?
I would love to see how many people choose "nice numbers" (like 100) instead of primary number (97)

What could happen if we all start using any other numerical system, like hexadecimal? I don't think we are going to say "Hey, it will break at 0x3C, I'm sure!". And what the number of digits would mean? it would be less accurate than now? Roll Eyes

Does anybody knnows if there is there any study about this kind of stuff?

cheers!

EDIT: (*) to be fair this happen on any market/society, not only bitcoin

EDIT 2:
I found a some research's about this topic:
http://mro.massey.ac.nz/bitstream/handle/10179/2695/02_whole.pdf?sequence=1 (a mbs thesis)
http://www.cepr.org/pubs/Bulletin/meets/1180.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_pricing

I rely on psychological pricing a lot.
It doesn't happen only with prices, but also with years.
Almost every time it is a year ending in zero, and especially "milestones" such as the beggining of a decade, century or millennium, there is a speculation of doomsday.
I believe in that case it might be related to apophenia and also in the way we learn the numeric system, our language system and some bad heuristics.

Lets say $1399, in written it is one thousand three hundred ninety nine.
And lets say $1401, in written it is one thousand four hundred one.
If someone is mathematically inclined and can take numbers objectively, and is asked to check a price from the newspaper and finds $1399, he would realize it is just 1 dollar away from $1400 so he would report back "oh it costs just about fourteen hundred dollars". That is how you synthesise the information.
Now, if someone who is less mathematically inclined, he would synthesize verbally instead of numerically. When he finds $1399 instead of synthesising numerically he would simplify it truncating it verbally "one thousand three hundred--", and report back "thirteen hundred dollars".

That is my hypothesis, and considering on how our brain is organized I would even say that the latter could be the characteristic of those who are more right brain dominant.

In China, sellers often abbreviate their prices -- e.g. "四百多 -- "four-hundred-odd". It often turns out that the "four-hundred-odd" can be "490". However this usually either results in the buyer trying to bargain them down, or walking away.