[virvar]

This is anecdotal, but I had a positive experience with the lack of privacy recently. I bought a baby stroller, after doing the typical research and finding a used model, I ended up buying a new one from some babyshop. All the pictures had shown the thing with the stroller “hat/head/sunscreen thing” (sorry I don’t know the English word for kalche), anyway, it wasn’t included and that was why the brand new stroller had been priced the same as the used ones.

But it’s bought and it’s nice, so whatever I hit the manufacturer website and find the correct product and google it, and get a flash sale from one of our most prominent baby stores. It was 350 Danish kr including delivery. Without closing the tap I check a few baby shops and a price checker website and see it’s actually 600-700 Danish krs everywhere, including on from the company the flash sale on google is form. So I buy it.

Apparently I hit the right combination of search history, and store advertising/inventory at exactly the right time.

Being curious I called my local baby store to ask why they could flash sale me at half price, and after a bit back and forth they apparently do this thing where they’ll catch you early with a cheap item and then when you come back they to buy it the next day it’ll be priced higher, except by then you’ve made up your mind to buy it and will pay the extra and I was just lucky having already made up my mind when I got it because the other store has been cheeky.

Not really related to DDG, but it’s the first time selling my privacy has paid off.

[yaktubi]

I feel like the Airline industry does this when they say, “only 4 more tickets left!” Or “2 tickets recently purchased!”

There’s probably some terminology for this in game theory (well, general salesmanship too)

[Neff]

In the UX world they are usually called urgency or scarcity triggers [1][2]. They also play in to the social default bias [3] people tend to have, where when alone you tend to do things that you know others have done.

1: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259906084_Scarcity_... 2 (PDF): https://www.uvic.ca/socialsciences/economics/assets/docs/sem... 3: https://www.coglode.com/gem/social-default-bias