[lucb1e]

I feel the same way and thought about this in the past when trying to come up with a way to compare two subjective numbers. I can't calculate whether a clock with lit-up hands is 7% more valuable so I need to use subjective judgement and I didn't want the number itself to be influencing me in irrelevant ways. One of the options being just over a round number seems to influence me, and it's not even necessarily the 9-at-the-end effect: consider 253¤ versus 282¤ versus 312¤. Whether you pay 250 or 280 isn't a huge difference, but going for the one over three hundred... oof! (The prices are actually equidistant: each ~10% or ~30 currency units apart.)

I never found a solution, but one idea was to scale competing products to a range of, say, 13 through 17. That will never cross any round number boundaries and one also can't use shortcuts like "it's essentially a tenner". I think that's when I discovered that it's very often down to two options and that anything scaled down to a range of 13 and 17 will turn into... 13 and 17! Surprise! I was not the smartest teenager.

Have you, or has anyone else reading this ever noticed this or given it thought, or even found a workable approach?