[cpeterso]

What is "consumer surplus"?

[harryh]

Let's say there was an product that you were willing to pay $10 for, but someone was selling it for only $6. By purchasing the product you get $4 worth of consumer surplus.

In general you probably get at least a bit of consumer surplus for everything you buy. The more surplus, the easier the decision to purchase (Of couse I would like to buy that brand new MacBook Pro for 10 bucks, thank you good sir!).

[netcan]

adding to that..

@ half the price and twice the customers you have all the customers who would have bought at the higher price "earning" whatever their surplus would have been + the (half) price - . On top of that you have all of the new customers "earning" a surplus beteen zero and the lower price.

[jklp]

> What is "consumer surplus"?

This reminds me of an old article written by Joel Spolsky which explains it quite well.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckie...

It also goes into detail about different pricing models too which I found a good starting off point for a programmer to learn about pricing.

[pmiller2]

It's money you're leaving on the table that people would otherwise be willing to pay you.

[tsm]

My microeconomics professor calls it the "good deal feel". That is, the difference between what customers expected to pay and what they ended up paying (savings).