Bøker av William Poundstone

The first book to reveal how everday pricing strategies manipulate us Why do text messages cost money while emails are free? Why do cereal packets keep getting smaller? Why do department stores have a few extortionate goods that no one will buy? Why do so many prices end in 9?Why do text messages cost money while e-mails are free? How does Apple persuade people to pay for music instead of downloading it for nothing? In Priceless, bestselling author William Poundstone reveals how we perceive value and why businesses set the prices we pay. Rooted in the emerging field of behavioural decision theory, Poundstone reveals the secrets that multinationals - including Microsoft, Coca-Cola, Nestle, Nokia and Mercedes - are willing to pay millions for from so-called price consultants. Revealing how conventional economics gets it all wrong, this is a stunning expose of how irrational we all are and how global businesses are taking advantage.

Pit your brains against the taxing riddles used by the world's best companies to select their staff

How do you predict something that has never happened before?

Prada stores carry a few obscenely expensive items in order to boost sales for everything else (which look like bargains in comparison). People used to download music for free, then Steve Jobs convinced them to pay. How? By charging 99 cents. That price has a hypnotic effect: the profit margin of the 99 Cents Only store is twice that of Wal-Mart. Why do text messages cost money, while e-mails are free? Why do jars of peanut butter keep getting smaller in order to keep the price the "same"? The answer is simple: prices are a collective hallucination.In Priceless, the bestselling author William Poundstone reveals the hidden psychology of value. In psychological experiments, people are unable to estimate "fair" prices accurately and are strongly influenced by the unconscious, irrational, and politically incorrect. It hasn't taken long for marketers to apply these findings. "Price consultants" advise retailers on how to convince consumers to pay more for less, and negotiation coaches offer similar advice for businesspeople cutting deals. The new psychology of price dictates the design of price tags, menus, rebates, "sale" ads, cell phone plans, supermarket aisles, real estate offers, wage packages, tort demands, and corporate buyouts. Prices are the most pervasive hidden persuaders of all. Rooted in the emerging field of behavioral decision theory, Priceless should prove indispensable to anyone who negotiates.

Learn how to succeed at interview mind games and win job offers at A‑list companies, with more than eighty difficult and devious questions, puzzles, and brain teasersEach year about 28 million Americans begin a search for a new job. Many more live in the age of the permanent job search, their online profiles eternally awaiting a better offer. Job seekers are more mobile and better informed than ever, aspiring to work for employers offering an appealing culture, a robust menu of perks, and opportunities for personal fulfillment and advancement. The result is that millions of applications stream to the handful of companies that regularly top listings of the best companies to work for: Apple, Netflix, Amazon, Alphabet, Disney, SpaceX, Oracle, Pricewaterhouse-Coopers, and others. Tesla has received as many as 200 applications for each open position. How do selective employers choose which people to hire? It’s through interviews asking uniquely demanding questions testing imagination, persistence, and creativity, like:   Can an astronaut throw a baseball so it hits Earth?   If you had $2,000, how would you double it in 24 hours?   How is a milk carton like a plane seat?   Chicken McNuggets come in boxes of 6, 9, and 20. What’s the largest number of McNuggets that McDonald’s can’t sell you?   How many dogs in the world have the exact same number of hairs?How Do You Fight a Horse-Sized Duck? explores the new world of interviewing at A-list employers. It reveals more than eighty notoriously challenging interview questions and supplies both answers and a general strategy for creative problem-solving.

Should you watch public television without pledging?...Exceed the posted speed limit?...Hop a subway turnstile without paying? These questions illustrate the so-called "prisoner's dilemma", a social puzzle that we all face every day. Though the answers may seem simple, their profound implications make the prisoner's dilemma one of the great unifying concepts of science. Watching players bluff in a poker game inspired John von Neumann-father of the modern computer and one of the sharpest minds of the century-to construct game theory, a mathematical study of conflict and deception. Game theory was readily embraced at the RAND Corporation, the archetypical think tank charged with formulating military strategy for the atomic age, and in 1950 two RAND scientists made a momentous discovery.Called the "prisoner's dilemma," it is a disturbing and mind-bending game where two or more people may betray the common good for individual gain. Introduced shortly after the Soviet Union acquired the atomic bomb, the prisoner's dilemma quickly became a popular allegory of the nuclear arms race. Intellectuals such as von Neumann and Bertrand Russell joined military and political leaders in rallying to the "preventive war" movement, which advocated a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union. Though the Truman administration rejected preventive war the United States entered into an arms race with the Soviets and game theory developed into a controversial tool of public policy-alternately accused of justifying arms races and touted as the only hope of preventing them. A masterful work of science writing, Prisoner's Dilemma weaves together a biography of the brilliant and tragic von Neumann, a history of pivotal phases of the cold war, and an investigation of game theory's far-reaching influence on public policy today. Most important, Prisoner's Dilemma is the incisive story of a revolutionary idea that has been hailed as a landmark of twentieth-century thought.

How to tackle the toughest interview questions Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google have to offer - and other perplexing problems to puzzle any mind!

Never before have we had so much information at our fingertips. You might think that we are better-informed than ever, but there's one thing we can't ask Google: ';What should I be googling?' The way we consume information in the digital age has been blamed for driving political polarisation and leaving us unable to agree on basic facts. It's also making us stupider. Personalised news feeds and social media echo chambers narrow our potential knowledge base. By now, we don't even know what we don't know. In Head in the Cloud, William Poundstone investigates the true worth of knowledge. An entertaining manifesto underpinned by big data analysis and illustrated by eye-opening anecdotes, it reveals the surprising benefits of broadening your horizons and provides an unnerving look at the consequences of being ill-informed.

We are hard-wired to believe that the world is more predictable than it is. We chase ';winning streaks' that are often just illusions, and we are all too predictable exactly when we try hardest not to be. In the 1970s, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky coined the phrase ';representativeness' to describe the psychology of this behaviour. Since then representativeness has been used by auditors to catch people fiddling their tax returns and by hedge fund managers to reap billions from the emotions of small investors. Now Poundstone for the first time makes these techniques fun, easy, and profitable for everyone, in the everyday situations that matter. You'll learn how to tackle multiple choice tests, what internet passwords to avoid, how to up your odds of winning the office Premier League sweepstakes, and the best ways to invest your money.