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by tuukkah 1876 days ago
"21.1% more likely" is how articles phrase a 21.1% increase in observed frequency.

"Sales increased 21.1%" is equivalent as long as the unit price remained the same.

1 comments

The article is very confusing on this front.

> People said they were 14.2% more likely to buy this chocolate bar when they were shown the version with a cost breakdown

Surely that cannot be correct. Possibly 14.2% of the people who were asked said that they would be "somewhat" more likely to buy X with more data stuck to its label (does any data improve sales? Did they A/B the label by adding random info?). This is very different from them acting upon it though.

Actually, the figure 14.2% does not even appear in the research article. The experiment was between two groups of random Mechanical Turk workers: one group was not shown the cost breakdown while the other group was. The workers answered how likely they were to buy the product on a scale from 1 to 7. If you calculate the average increase from one group to the other, sure enough the number you get is 14.2% but it is not a probability.