[throwaway7281]

Value-based pricing is the worst societal invention. Imagine a medicine can be made from simple ingredients, but you discovered a recipe by accident. It's very valuable since it might save lives, so the value is high, the cost is low and you can reap the benefit on the mere basis that you discovered something by accident. You also need to make sure that no one "gets it", so do not educate people, just milk them - and in the worst case, mislead them, work against any threat "knowledge" would pose.

Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur.

Imagine a world, where progress and invention would be something shared and done not out of greed but out of ability and ultimately generosity that would add to the grace of our race.

Instead we celebrate greed, as if we were a bunch of apes.

My fear is that human society needs to reach new lows before we actually have the chance to see our own potential (and then it might be too late, anyway).

[fsloth]

Value based pricing is not about obfuscating your product.

If you manage to get extra revenues because the market values what you have you can invest the surplus to more better products.

The point is, you shouldn't dictate what users value your product, let the users dictate it.

"Imagine a world, where progress and invention would be something shared and done not out of greed but out of ability and ultimately generosity that would add to the grace of our race."

The first gotcha there is figuring out what exactly is the grace of the race. Most entities that successfully employ these sort of mission statements are dictatorships and the like and I'm sure you didn't mean that.

I think the first hurdle to get over is that world is complex and us people are not smart enough to handle all of that.

[lotsofpulp]

>Imagine a medicine can be made from simple ingredients, but you discovered a recipe by accident. It's very valuable since it might save lives, so the value is high, the cost is low and you can reap the benefit on the mere basis that you discovered something by accident. You also need to make sure that no one "gets it", so do not educate people, just milk them - and in the worst case, mislead them, work against any threat "knowledge" would pose.

Except that's not the world we live in. Effective medicines take billions of dollars, years of time from very smart people who have the option of choosing other careers, and still have an extremely high chance of failure. Imagining a world where all of that happens via charity is pointless.

[cortesoft]

There are consequences to an economy where the margin is fixed across all industry... just look at the free internet... since the you basically get paid for eyeballs, with no premium for providing more value (a visitor gives you the same per user price for ads no matter the quality of the content), there is a race for cheap content that appeals to the most number of people... you don't get investment in companies that provide high value, because you don't get more return for high value.

[exolymph]

Supply and demand dynamics =/= invention, but rather description.

[throwaway7281]

I understand the price signal and the process of price detection through the myriads of needs and abilities. That's all fine and actually great, as a relatively robust distributed system.

What I do not get is why keeping people in the dark is a cornerstone to many endeavours - value-based pricing just being an example of that.

Edit: maybe I spend too much time in the open source world and mistake it for some model setup for other parts of society that do not work like that at all.

[yellowapple]

And indeed, from the article:

> Because Natera's test [for pre-natal Down syndrome] is better than its competitors' products, the company charges more.

That is, instead of eliminating the older, more invasive diagnostic procedures and making the world a better place for all of humanity, Natera instead opted to charge extra for it (regardless of how much it actually costs to them) because they know people will pay more for it, and Sequoia is celebrating this and championing it as an example to be followed.

This is the kind of greedy capitalist bullshit that gets L'Internationale playing in my head.