This paper experimentally examines whether looking at other people's pricing decisions is a type of heuristic - a decisionmaking rule - that people use even when it is not applicable, as in the case of clearly private value goods. We find evidence that this is indeed the case - an individual's...

When faced with a choice of selecting one of several available products (or possibly buying nothing), a standard theoretical perspective suggests that the option with the highest benefitcost difference will be chosen. This analysis applies to all prices including the price of zero. In contrast,...