Raising prices to lower demand to make more money
Imagine you’re selling couches and you don’t know the true market value. If you advertise 20 couches for $100 each, you’ll have 100 customers lined up. What should you do?
Economic Action
Raise your prices. You will keep the customers who were willing to pay more, and get rid of the “extra” customers. Lowering the number of customers by raising your prices makes more money, and eases your workload of responding to potential customers.
Example: Selling 20 couches for $100 each will net you $2,000. If 1/4 of your customers (25%) are willing will pay $200 for a couch, you’ll make twice as much.
Ideally, you want to make as much money as you can — but this is difficult because you don’t know exactly how much a consumer is willing to pay.
Real Life Application
This can be applied towards items that you put on Craigslist. Let’s say you have an Ipod Nano that you don’t know the value of.
Imagine your post on Craigslist for $20 gets 100 responses. This is a good sign, because a lot of people want your Ipod, but you can only sell it to one and you want to make the most money you can.
Repost it for a higher amount and see how much people are willing to pay for it. If you get no responses, play around with it until you get the number of responses you want (generally 3 or 4 for this product because not everyone who is interested will buy it).
