This post introduces the concept of a “cheerful price” and (through examples and counterexamples) narrows it down to a precise notion that’s useful for negotiating payment. Concretely:
Having “cheerful price” in your conceptual toolkit means you know you can look for the number at which you are cheerful (as opposed to “the lowest number I can get by on”, “the highest number I think they’ll go for”, or other common strategies). If you genuinely want to ask for an amount that makes you cheerful and no more, knowing that such a number might exist at all is useful.
Even if you might want to ask for more than your cheerful price, your cheerful price helps bound how low you want the negotiation to go (subject to constraints listed in the post, like “You need to have Slack”).
If both parties know what “cheerful price” means it’s way easier to have a negotiation that leaves everyone feeling good by explicitly signaling “I will feel less good if made to go below this number, but amounts above this number don’t matter so much to me.” That’s not the way to maximize what you get, but that’s often not the goal in a negotiation and there are other considerations (e.g. how people feel about the transaction, willingness to play iterated games, etc.) that a cheerful price does help further.
The other cool thing about this post is how well human considerations are woven in (e.g. inner multiplicity, the need for safety margins, etc.). The cheerful price feels like a surprisingly simple widget given how much it bends around human complexity.
This post introduces the concept of a “cheerful price” and (through examples and counterexamples) narrows it down to a precise notion that’s useful for negotiating payment. Concretely:
Having “cheerful price” in your conceptual toolkit means you know you can look for the number at which you are cheerful (as opposed to “the lowest number I can get by on”, “the highest number I think they’ll go for”, or other common strategies). If you genuinely want to ask for an amount that makes you cheerful and no more, knowing that such a number might exist at all is useful.
Even if you might want to ask for more than your cheerful price, your cheerful price helps bound how low you want the negotiation to go (subject to constraints listed in the post, like “You need to have Slack”).
If both parties know what “cheerful price” means it’s way easier to have a negotiation that leaves everyone feeling good by explicitly signaling “I will feel less good if made to go below this number, but amounts above this number don’t matter so much to me.” That’s not the way to maximize what you get, but that’s often not the goal in a negotiation and there are other considerations (e.g. how people feel about the transaction, willingness to play iterated games, etc.) that a cheerful price does help further.
The other cool thing about this post is how well human considerations are woven in (e.g. inner multiplicity, the need for safety margins, etc.). The cheerful price feels like a surprisingly simple widget given how much it bends around human complexity.