The Value of Familiarity #
This is slightly crazy:
For the first part of their study Dr Alter and Dr Oppenheimer picked 37 “volunteers” at random from the university’s canteen. They asked them to estimate how many simple objects—gumballs, paperclips and pencils—they could purchase with either a standard dollar bill or a Susan B. Anthony dollar coin that was presented to them. Susan B. Anthony dollars are legal tender but, having been produced only from 1979-81 and then again in 1999, they are rarely seen in circulation.
After the volunteers had made their estimates, they were asked to indicate on a scale of one to seven how familiar they were with either the banknote or the coin. Dr Alter and Dr Oppenheimer were not surprised to find that all participants were less familiar with the coin than with the banknote. Nor were they that surprised to find a difference in how the participants valued coin and note (the expectation that there would be a difference was, after all, the point of doing the experiment). They were, however, flabbergasted by the size of the difference. People offered the banknote believed, on average, that they could use it to buy 83 paperclips, 72 napkins or 46 sweets. Those offered the coin thought 39 paperclips, 51 napkins or 27 sweets. In other words, the note was believed to be almost twice as valuable as the coin.
And essentially the same thing happened when they offered two one-dollar bills versus one two-dollar bill.