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b12353

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Everything posted by b12353

  1. Are there readers here who have gone w/o politics or activism and found they enjoyed their lives a bit more? There are short-term wins when following politics, but it's so often disappointing. I would bet from @happiness' question that he/she doesn't enjoy the battle, so why do it?
  2. No, the ARI store example wasn't fair because they're not the same product. You're right. I was trying to be funny but it wasn't a good comparison. But then you go on to bring ARI's costs (in site maintenance and bandwidth) into the picture. What if ARI more than covers its costs on identical products that are also available for free elsewhere and the convenience benefit to the user is (somehow) neglible? That's the hypothetical we've been considering, and the convenience argument has already been addressed. (Why do ARI's costs even matter? They don't matter to the user. ) I explained above that the disabled person was cognizant of what he was getting, that he needed the software, and that I made him disabled just to encourage pity. Selling GNU software is also legal (though I believe you also have to make it available somewhere for free as well), and I don't imagine you consider it my job to tell folks about my customers' pricing plans. With these things in mind, I'm out of guesses as to why you think the disabled person example was dishonest. Unfair? That's the question. But dishonest (in the narrow definition of the word)? "If instead I just charged a fixed price, my only direct feedback on whether the price is correct would be either having too many clients, or not having enough of them." This is how a lot of companies determine prices. You know, supply and demand? I don't know what to think about the pricing strategy you've chosen, which you may know is called "value-based pricing". If customer Y approaches you for a program exactly like the one you just built for customer X, and you ask Y, "What's the value of it to you?", I don't know about that. It seems not much different from saying to him, "Well, tell me how much money you've got. Then I'll tell you the price." You say, "I'd be losing money because my pricing sucks." You lose money when you don't cover your costs. If you define your costs by how much your customer is willing to pay, then it's easy to lose money. You also say, "And second, it prevents the client from buying something that isn't worth it for him" and "guess which one of them gets my limited time". These benefits can be implemented in other pricing strategies. I think your example is helping me to realize that the market should be used as the determiner of price. Ignoring the question of value-based pricing for now, the assumption of the purchaser, due to all this exposure to competitive pricing over her lifetime, is that the price for any product reflects the product's value reasonable assumptions about value and competitors' prices. (Value is relative but we can make good guesses about average values, maybe). It becomes more tempting to the seller to set prices higher when he's dealing with a customer one-on-one because his competitors aren't there. (Or, it becomes tempting only to sellers whose values are out of whack.) If the seller takes advantage of this and sets prices high, is it a form of dishonesty because he's broken the purchaser's assumption?
  3. Ha ha. I found an example of something being for free in one place but for a price in another: free: not free: https://estore.aynrand.org/p/165/principled-leadership-mp3-download
  4. A person could say that we need to consider all of the consequences in the long term, as StrictlyLogical did, but the software seller in this case faces no long term negative consequences for, say, using good marketing tactics to repeatedly sell unnecessarily expensive products.
  5. Thank you everyone for your answers. Thanks, Eiuol, for helping another to understand the question. It was a mistake to introduce the disabled person; as I should've expected (and would've done myself, probably), you thought I meant that he was incapable of making a decision for himself, when what I really meant to do was introduce somebody who correctly "knows he would benefit" from the software but is easy to pity. Yes, StrictlyLogical, emotions can't be blindly acted upon, though I find hypotheticals like this (which really could happen) make me think harder. Eiuol, it is a value for value trade. The software really is a value to the person. (Maybe I created the confusion with the disabled person). "It's not wrong to profit from a person's decision that you wouldn't advise, while it would be wrong to intentionally offer a product ...[that]... is in no way different except being overpriced." I think this is contradictory. dream_weaver, I don't see how this is a no-win scenario. The seller could stop selling the product if he thinks it's wrong to do so, or (if he believes that the value he provides is convenience, as Reidy says) continue selling it and be happy that he's saving people time. Reidy's answer is the best one in my opinion. I just find it difficult to accept that a buyer and seller can trade, and both can benefit (and hence it's a win-win), but the buyer is, say, in an emotional state that prevents him from looking around for just a second (because a loved one just died and he's distressed or he's really tired or something) to see that he would really benefit much more by going with a different seller. Why would an Objectivist promote win-win scenarios but then, after it's established that both parties to a transaction win, throw up his hands and say that any difference in the amounts of benefit gained by the two sides after that is fair game?
  6. Is it moral to sell a product or service when you know your customer could get it somewhere else for less? (Let's assume that you also know that the competitor selling the product for less is able to do so in a way that he can sustain indefinitely.) The transaction between you and the customer would be by mutual consent to mutual profit (and thus win-win), but it would not be in the customer's best interest. Here's a hypothetical: imagine that your customer is a mentally disabled person on a low income who knows he would benefit from an expensive software program you are offering and yet who doesn't know that the software is GPL-licensed and thus available for free elsewhere. I think that I would feel ashamed if I were able to win customers with an identical but more expensive product (which I might do with better marketing).
  7. I'm looking for an accountability pardner (I'm from Texas) for brief, daily phone calls through which we'll report how well we're accomplishing our goals. I currently have a partner and I'm looking for another. I don't often spend time wondering whether I'm behaving consistently with Objectivist principles, and, to be a match with me, you wouldn't either.
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