Price bracketing

The choice-architecture mechanism behind a three-option proposal: you place your real target price in the middle, bracketed by a higher anchor above it and a genuine floor below it. The bracket does the persuading — the anchor makes the target feel reasonable, the floor gives a real way in without collapsing the target, and the buyer’s attention settles on the middle. It’s why the anchor is priced to be adjusted down from, not sold, and why “starting at” is a mistake: “starting at” shrinks the top number, when bracketing needs it large.

Source: A course-coined label for the mechanism Blair Enns builds his three-option proposal around (Pricing Creativity; The Four Conversations ch. 4 — PRACTITIONER). It rests on two documented effects: Tversky & Kahneman’s anchoring (the high option sets the reference point) and Dan Ariely’s decoy / asymmetric-dominance effect (Predictably Irrational), where adding a third option predictably reshapes which one people choose (INDEPENDENT-adjacent).

First used in: 3.2 · Three-option proposals