New Page 1I
bought myself a nice pair of shoes this weekend. I was looking for a
pair that would (a) complement my new Miami Vice jacket and (b)
wouldn't hurt my bunions. But I hit pay dirt. Here's what I got: Sperry Top-Sider invented
the boat shoe in 1935 with the goal of letting you make the oceans,
lakes and rivers your own personal frontier. Our Nautical Collection
will let you own the water. Sperry Top-Sider is best known for boat
shoes that have logged more miles of open ocean than any other. The
shoes have out-raced, out-cruised, out-fished any and all competitors,
again and again, from 1935 to this moment. Now, after almost 70 years
of quality and craftsmanship, STS celebrates the new generation that's
discovering that classics are helping to kick off the Sperry Top-Sider
brand of tomorrow. It's a global brand that lives and breathes
adventure at sea, and excitement on every other body of water. Our
brand talks to sailors, kayakers, windsurfers, power boaters, and
fisherman -- to everyone who loves the water. If you can't live without
water, Sperry Top-Sider. Get Wet. So
I did. Turns out that the shoes fill with water and do a damn good job
of holding it in all day. I haven't yet been able to test whether wet
feet will help my fishing, maybe even let me win a competition. But I'm
optimistic. My
STS's got me thinking. My immediate thought, of course, was to wonder
why anyone would sell a pair of shoes on the basis that they're good
for doing things that involve, essentially, sitting on one's arse all
day. But
seeing as I was indeed sitting on my arse (although, technically, I
wasn't owning the water at the time), I continued thinking. STS's are
what we call an experience good. I can't really tell how good
they are until I buy them. Once I buy them, if they turn out to be good
enough I'll make repeat purchases in the future. The firm's challenge
is to get me to make that first purchase. It does so by sending me
signals -- in this case, purple prose that would have made Ernest
Hemingway (who, chances are, owned a few pairs of STS's himself) reach
for the bottle -- to convince me that the product meets my standards. An
unfortunate byproduct of advertising is that each firm is setting me up
for a winner's curse. I buy products with only limited information
about their quality. The upshot is that I am likely to buy goods for
which I have received the most misleading, overoptimistic, signals. A
lot of these goods will not only turn out to be worse than I had hoped;
they will also turn out to be of a quality that does not even meet my
minimum standard. The
usual solution to the winner's curse problem is to raise my standards.
In the future, not only will I demand that any shoes I buy let me own
the ocean and cushion my bunions. They have to cure my hemorrhoids as
well. Or as Tom Waits once put it: That's right, it filets, it chops, it dices, slices, never stops, lasts a lifetime, mows your lawn, and it mows your lawn. And it picks up the kids from school. It gets rid of unwanted facial hair, it gets rid of embarrassing age spots. It delivers a pizza, and it lengthens, and it strengthens. And it finds that slipper that's been at large under the chaise longue for several weeks. And it plays a mean Rhythm Master. It makes excuses for unwanted lipstick on your collar, and it's only a dollar. Step right up. Raising
my standards induces firms to raise their claims. Which makes me
skeptical and causes my to raise my standard yet again. This is an arms
race. But
firms may be doing things wrong. Firms that disappoint me too much may
end up pissing me off. Even if my STS's are comfortable (which they
are), I might not buy them again because I will remember, above all
else, just how disappointed I was the first time I went fishing in
them. Emotions such as disappointment undermine my rationality. (There
is an fascinating new literature on emotions and decision-making, much
of it pioneered by Carnegie Mellon economistGeorge Loewenstein -- see this article from the New York Times Magazine). Firms
selling to emotional people like me have to balance two very different
concerns. On the one hand, they need to make outlandish promises to
induce me to buy things the first time round. On the other, they need
to make modest claims to avoid disappointing me, thereby inducing me to
buy things more than once. Now there's a challenge for the advertisers. Love Disappoints.
In David Henry Hwang’s play, The Golden Child, a character comments
that “the fact that something is new means only that it hasn’t had time
to disappoint us.” This insight explains why most of your relationships
will turn out to be a less than you hoped for. Imagine you are single
and looking for a partner. You meet people from time to time, and you
get some rough indication of their quality as a potential partner. When
one meets your no doubt very exacting standard, you start dating. But
then, over time, you discover their true quality. The winner’s curse
tells us that the person you are most likely to start dating is the
person you whose quality you had initially most overestimated. It is
likely therefore, that whoever you date is the person who will
disappoint you most. But when you dump him or her, you shouldn’t be
angry. After all, you almost certainly proved to be a disappointment as
well. Faced
with the winner's curse, you should raise your standards. Only date
people who seems to be near-perfect. But this strategy backfires if,
like me, disappointment makes you unhappy. Then what you need to do is
date only the least attractive. If the relationship turns out to be
lousy, you can always claim you did it for a dare. If it turns out to
be good, the surprise will double your happiness. This was a strategy I
followed assiduously as a teenager in the United Kingdom. I'm not sure
it worked, but I sure did get a lot more dates.
9:39:48 AM
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