Your Cheerful Price

It's sometimes hard for me to figure out exactly where my "cheerful price" is. So when I'm "negotiating" with people I trust, I often list a couple of prices, that are some set of:

• I definitely would not do it at this price (without it being a favor/ social exchange)
• The lowest price I think I would do it at. 
• My Satisfied Price: I am happy to do the thing for you! This is what I normally get paid for similar jobs
• My Cheerful Price: I am excited to do the thing for you! This is more than my average, and I am actively happy about the opportunity!
• My Ecstatic Price: My Cheerful Price is definitely lower than this. I would be ecstatic if you paid me $100 / hr to do laundry. This is an amazing deal for me. 

This can help because finding the ONE SPECIFIC NUMBER that is your Cheerful Price feels daunting.  But feeling out a range helps you narrow it down.

For example: "You want my blegg?? Well I definitely wouldn't give it to you for $10. But if you offered me for $500 I'd think it was my lucky day and you were crazy. Normally I give people bleggs for about $100. I've never gotten more than $200 for a blegg, and I was really happy about that, so.... $200?"

And honestly I feel more comfortable giving someone that whole set of information than just throwing out $200.  

 

To me this post may very well be a good example of some of the things that make me uncomfortable about the rationalist community, and why I so far have chosen to engage with it very minimally and mostly stay a lurker. At the risk of making a fool of myself, especially since it’s late and I didn’t read the whole post thoroughly (partly because you gave me an excuse not to halfway through) I’m going to try to explain why.

I don’t charge friends for favours, nor would I accept payment if offered. I’m not all that uncomfortable with the idea of “social capital” as a whole—I grew up partially with Portuguese culture where people will, for example, fight to pay the bill at a restaurant, because it turns out to be pretty good to be known as the guy who’s done favours for everybody in the village—but generally speaking, if I’m not willing to do a favour for a friend, then no amount of money will change that fact. At the point where you’re paying me, it ceases to be a favour, and it becomes a business transaction. Business transactions between friends are fraught.

I think a lot plays into this.

Turning a favour into a transaction means it starts being judged based on market norms rather than social norms. People treat these situations differently: there’s a famous case study of a daycare that started charging parents for picking up their kids late, only for the number of late pickups to skyrocket, because parents now felt that they could absolve their guilt by paying the fine. That change was long-lasting: even after removing the fine, things didn’t get better. In fact, IIRC it got even worse. They were still judging it based on market norms, but now the cost was $0!

When you pay someone to do things, you briefly become their employer, and that’s not a good kind of relationship to have with a friend. The employer-employee relationship is one, at least partially, of dominance: the employer now has the ability to make the employee’s life better or worse in some marginal way. You don’t usually want that in a friendship, it’s better to be in even footing.

And also? It sends a signal that you’re bad at estimating social capital and trying to paper over that weakness with money. This throws up alarm bells about what other social situations, with myself or with a third party, you might mess up in the future, and whether or not it might be a social risk to associate too closely with you.

These are all things I can tolerate in an ally, but would negatively affect anyone who wanted to be a close friend. Maybe I could put up with it, but it would take effort and patience to get past that.

My point in this isn’t to criticize you personally, or to say you’re a bad person for doing this. (Far from it, I admit there’s a kind of economic elegance to it.) It’s to try and describe the flip side, that it’s about more than just “feeling icky”.

And I think this is important, especially for building IRL communities, because I expect that people like me outnumber people like you.

I do really like this essay. It's generally a good idea, and there are a lot of situations where I would find this idea useful.

One thing I want to dive into a little bit here is this:

Fine, to be wholly frank, I do tend to see the indignant reaction "How dare you price that in money!" as a sign that somebody was brought up generally economically illiterate. 

I do think there are things, especially in terms of social interactions and between friends, that really shouldn't have a price on them, because they're things that only make sense if they're already net-positive actions that make everyone happy without money being exchanged, and once you're paying someone you create uncertainty about that.  If I invite you to come to a party, I want you to come if you want to come and not come if you don't, I really wouldn't be interested if the only way for both of us to be cheerful about you coming to my party would happen if one of us gave money to the other for the privilege. There are ways around it (if I have a bunch of people over and they want to chip in for pizza or whatever I certainly wouldn't be offended), but for the most part I only want those kind of things to happen if everyone involved has a cheerful price of zero, otherwise it's not as much fun.

You can extend that to a lot of other minor favors in a friendships; many of them may be something that is most optimal if it's something that makes us both happy without money, and once one of us is paying the other for it, it can change the dynamic in a way that isn't great. I would never say "how dare you price that in money" because I would never find the suggestion offensive, but there are times when I do think involving money makes it less optimal than it could be.

That being said, I do really like your "cheerful price" idea, especially in cases where someone is doing something for me that they would otherwise expect to get paid for (like asking a friend who's a professional photographer if they want to take photos for an event I'm holding.)   

One cautionary note is that once you invoke this idea, I feel like you're indicating willingness to pay the person some amount to do the thing, if you can both agree on a reasonable (cheerful or just satisfactory) number. 

Like if I'm kind of inclined to bake you a cake for free, and you ask for my cheerful price and I tell you - even if you don't take up the offer at my cheerful price, I'm definitely not going to make the cake for free now. That would be bad business.

Curation notice: I already said in a different comment that this post is dope. For this curation notice let me be more specific about why I think that:

• Cheerful prices seem to me like an actively useful piece of social technology, as I've seen them used successfully in the wild several times amongst rationalists. I'm glad there's now a clear write-up of them.
• Explaining social technology clearly in terms of microeconomics is really valuable and hard to do well. In particular, this post engages with lots of reasons that people have a hard time using basic microeconomic intuitions in their personal life, and gives advice about when it is and isn't the right idea. I felt like I grew stronger at grokking microeconomics by reading the post, even as a person who regularly uses money and taxes and bets and trades in his personal life.
• The Q&A is both thorough and very fun. Eliezer's dialogues are always really fun, I liked when it went meta, it felt like a pretty real and honest dialogue to me.

Thanks for the post Eliezer :)

Wow this was dope. Great to read a LW post from you Eliezer.

Let me try to use the idea a little, and figure out what my cheerful prices are for a few things right now.

• Commenting substantively on someone’s Google doc (in a relatively rare case where I wouldn’t just do this for free): $200
• Build flat-pack furniture for someone: $300/hour
• Play Baba Is You (levels from the level editor) for 30 mins: $40
• Leave the room and be elsewhere for 10 minutes: $75
• Have a 1-hour call with a random person on a topic of their choosing: $500

...I notice I have an especially high premium on “do something right now”. My prices are much lower for “do it sometime this week”.

And of course, if you’ve read the post, you know these aren’t my fair prices, just what fills me with cheer.

One problem: a high price can put more stress on a person, and raising the price further won't fix that!

For instance, say that you leave a fic half-finished, and someone offers a million dollars to MIRI iff you finish it. Would you actually feel cheerful and motivated, or might you feel stressed and avoidant and guilty about being slow, and have a painful experience in actually writing it?

(If you've personally mastered your relevant feelings, I think you'd still agree that many people haven't.)

I don't know what to do in that case.

I think many people view friendship as a form of alliance. Ally friends perform favors for each other as a way to tie tighter bonds between them and signal that their goals are aligned. I want to bake you a cake for exactly $0 because baking a cake will help you and I want what's best for you so helping you directly helps me. So in the future, after I bake you your cake, you of course will drive me to the airport because that would help me and you want what's best for me right? It's not a direct scratch-my-back-and I'll-scratch-yours exchange of favors, it's developing a strong alliance between our interests. We can then rely on that alliance for mutual assistance in the future. The two most common danger ally-friends are on the lookout for are 1) over-reliance by their friend; and 2) mere burden shifting from their friend.

1. Over-reliance is when Bob always asks his lawyer friend Alice for legal advice and for her opinion on complicated topics. Alice spends hours of her time (that she could otherwise use to bill $400/hour) on these favors yet Bob doesn't provide her even half of the value that she gives him. Bob's reliance on Alice is still efficient, it's much easier for her to do the legal research than him, but Bob is not putting in enough to get what Alice is giving him. Alice will eventually grow resentful of Bob and stop doing favors for him entirely.

2. Burden shifting is when Alice and Bob are both friends of equal cooking ability yet Alice still asks Bob to cook her cakes. The amount of effort expended by either to make the cake is exactly the same so Alice having Bob cook is no more efficient for the alliance than if she cooked the cake herself. Bob notices this and asks why Alice doesn't cook the cake herself. If Alice can convince him that somehow it is more efficient for Bob to cook the cake the alliance can continue. If Bob can't be convinced he will stop cooking cakes because why the hell was he even cooking them in the first place?

But attempts to pay an ally friend for their favors is a whole other unexpected issue that can even seem like betrayal. Ally friends would dislike your way of offering them money in exchange for a favor because that would imply that when they seek a favor from you, you would expect money in return! Then to them there never was any alliance between you at all. From their perspective, you offering them money in exchange for a favor is tantamount to admitting that you were actually just pretending to be their friend the whole time.

I'm too lazy to go find the citations, but other people have pointed out two objections to this concept, and I find them compelling:

1. A norm of exchanging cash for assistance makes it very difficult for "the poor person" to get assistance when they have a bad day and, for example, just need someone else to do the dishes that night. 1a. Financial situations can change, and "the poor person" next year might be the same human as the one offering cash today.

2. Open-ended transactions build relationships. By paying for the favor, that closes the transaction. 2a. Maybe a deeper relationship with a roommate is not desired? 2b. Maybe the person you ask for a cheerful price can quote $0 (or something else obviously trivial like $1 to bake a cake). That seems like the most effective way of indicating "asking me for a cheerful price will backfire and damage our relationship, rather than maintaining it." 2c. Maybe in some circles, relationships can be mediated by cash, and it's just among the ~80% of everyone who hold money at least somewhat sacred and/or budgeted that such a scheme doesn't work.

I'm not sure I use this particular price mechanism fairly often, but I think this post was involved in me moving toward often figuring out fair prices for things between friends and allies, which I think helps a lot. The post puts together lots of the relevant intuitions, which is what's so helpful about it. +4

Man Iove how much of a departure this is from "shut up and multiply". In many ways it's "stop multiplying and feel things". I would really love to see the synthesis of these two views (which is in many ways a "practical virtues ethics vs. practical utilitarianism thing")

What kind of interactions do you have that make this a frequently applicable concept? The only reason to get a good or service from a friend rather than a stranger professional is if it is in some way more efficient. Even disregarding the fact that asking for things from friends is generally less efficient because of the potentially fraughtness, this doesn't happen much for me. If I ask a friend to make me a cake, it's because I already know it is positive sum. If I want cake qua cake I go to a cake shop. The only examples I can think of where it would be applicable are:

• Staying with a friend for a period where it's unclear if/how much rent you should pay
• Division of chores with housemates (but limited applicability because IME people are averse to significantly uneven splits of labour even if compensated)
• Possible-example: in my world it is customary to attempt to offer compensation if you freeride on someone driving somewhere. I suspect this might seem strange to you, since assuming they enjoy your company and the difference in gas costs is negligible, the cost to the driver is surely negative so the money should flow the other way.
• Non-example: selling something second-hand to a friend - I would just use ebay price minus P&P, possibly with some arbitrary discount

This does not seem like enough to warrant minting a general concept, so I'm curious what examples you have in mind.

Q: Technical objection: Surely if you're asking everybody in the room to name their Cheerful Price for something, you should pay the lowest bidder the second-lowest bid, not pay the lowest bidder their actual bid?""

I chuckled when I got here, because I had just had this thought myself.

It seems like it can't be correct to always do this, because the second-lowest bid could in fact end up above the asker's willingness to pay. However, under the assumption generally made in the post -- that any happy price from anybody you're asking for one will likely be under that threshold, and often way under -- the second-lowest-bid heuristic seems like it could be a good thing to at least consider.

As defined, I think my cheerful price for many purposes would be extremely high, like 50$ for giving you the cup of coffee I just bought from the Starbucks across the street. However, it just seems rude to name a price that high to a friend, my instincts to not offend a friend are driving the price I would say downwards, maybe you are trying to not expend friendship capital by asking me for my cheerful price, but naming a high price feels to me like I'm expending friendship capital. And in fact there might be some part of me that resents you for asking me to name a cheerful price, so you're expending friendship capital in just asking for my cheerful price. If I do actually want to make the trade, I'm also thinking of the likelihood that you'll stop bargaining once you find out that my cheerful price is too high, which drives the number I'll say still more downward. My point is that it's basically impossible to not expend friendship capital when asking someone to name any price at all. 

But within that range, there's a zero-sum problem of dividing the gains from trade, on top of the positive-sum interaction of having the trade occur at all.  

I think one of the points of this article is that it's not zero-sum. There are ways to divide the gains in a way that strengthens the relationship between both parties and if the person who wants to initiate the trade ask for a cheerful price it's likely that the transaction strengthens the relationship if it happens.

Should the development of projects like LessWrong be funded by people working at their cheerful prices?

Nope. There is little hope in optimizing such that people working on most important projects (LW, most startups, etc) are not paying any personal costs in order to do them. Being a hero is not easy, and it feels naive to say something like "what if everyone was cheerful 100% of the time". Cheerful prices allow certain positive interpersonal interactions to happen rather than not happen, but it doesn't seem worth it to do for jobs.

I think fair prices are important goals, and even sometimes prices-where-you-feel-you're-getting-a-great-deal. But I think cheerful prices are probably too high a bar.

Oh my goodness I love this. I'm actually so philosophically on board that I'm confused about treating Cheerful Prices as single real numbers. In my homo-economicus worldview, there exists a single price at which I'm exactly indifferent and then my cheerfulness goes up smoothly/continuously from there. It feels very arbitrary to pick something on that continuum and call it "the" cheerful price I have.

(My answer is to turn the nerdery up to 11 and compute a Shapley value, etc etc, but let me save that for another time or place. Jacob Falkovich and I have been talking about jointly blogging about this. We'll definitely want to tie it in to the concept of Cheerful Prices if we do!)

Translated into this delightful new language of Cheerful Prices, the rough version of my approach is like so:

I as the buyer name my lowest possible Cheerful Price (where I just barely find it worth it) and you as the seller name your highest possible Cheerful Price (above which it's just not worth it to you) and we settle on the mean of those two.

But maybe the point of Cheerful Prices is to simplify that. Let one person on one side of the trade make a guess about the consumer surplus and name something in that range. I.e., by naming my Cheerful Price I'm saying that at that price I'd be getting a big enough chunk of the consumer surplus that I don't need to know the size of your chunk. If you, as my counterparty, feel the same then we're golden.

A few practical remarks, that I believe should be resolved if this were to be implemented generally. How do you deal with people who are not cheerful to have spent the time thinking about their cheerful price, and having the deal not occurred. As you wrote, they may have imagined that the price will be pay and enjoy this thought, they probably need to do this to ensure that the price is cheerful, and so it may hurts a little bit. Worse, if you speaks to a room, then you are essentially asking a bunch of people to do a quote, that's actual work, because they need to be listen to you, consider the question, and know that whatever price they quote, there is plenty of chance not to be selected because someone gave a lower price.

I'd add that, if you want to obey the law, tax laws in particular, then anything you do for a price is going to be freelancing at least, to need to be declared to the tax authority, requires paperwork, potential tax service check, social security, retirement contribution... depending on the country. So, while I agree it could make sens to behave this way with friends who are also freelancers, it seems extremely hard to generalize todays, unless you accept to put those friends at middle-term risk. Maybe you know all of your friends can deal with any of those complication if required, if a tax authority asks why there are more money on their bank account, but if anyone fear hurting someone by accepting a price to low, then I would assume the same person would fear those consequences too.

I know for a fact I sometime rejected job I would have been able to do and was offered a correct price just because I need to do tax declaration in three or four countries and the few hundreds euros I could have made were not worth the added complexity.

Warning: autobiography and emotions ahead, I have to disclaimer this due to the anxiety I will describe later, or else I will feel I'm wasting someone's time. Thank you for understanding.

From early on I learned to hate money and especially business transactions regarding debt or interest. It felt very, very wrong. I early on chose to take the mantle of "never give a loan if you will be perturbed or think less of someone should they not be able to repay it, and if you do need to take, then pay it forward tenfold. Most of all, never expect them to thank you, but it's nice when it happens.".

Through much of my life this worked out very well. I gave and I gave and I gave. I offered quickly if someone seemed in need. I made a great number of friends and longtime companions from this mentality.

What happened was that when the fortunes turned, and my life began to spiral downwards, my hedges got hedged and then those hedges got liquidated, and I found myself leveraging emotional debt rather than "true" debt. This also came from a spoiled childhood; I still feel ashamed for what I took from my grandfather, as he lived his entire life like that; it's not until they're gone you realize how selfish you had been when on the receiving end of gifts and love. I have been forced to ask for help about three or four times since then. Every time I was absolutely ashamed of myself for having to do so, despite both 1. the people I asked were completely willing to do so not for 2, but because they loved me in whatever form, and 2. knowing how much I had done for them in the past.

2 was worse. 2 reminded me that I wasn't asking for genuine help, I was expecting. And expecting is not how I want transactions to be. I'm sure (and know) that many came to me expecting, and I obliged them before they asked, because the attitude is very blatant. I don't mind. I knew I was doing it because I wanted to, not because I felt guilty. I had gone through that rodeo and I would never feel guilt-tripped again. This has caused me some additional harm in the form of split situations and empathy, but that's a different issue.

2 wasn't always financial. It was often emotional, or therapeutic. Before my life became a stressball I was an amazing listener. Now I'm hungry. I have to figure out where to be unlucky next. Motivation fails me. My cheerful price is very low, but not sustainable. As my experience and patience become more and more eroded by time and torture, and the number of individuals willing to give me a cheerful price become fewer and fewer, finally, in the midst of this pandemic, I found myself alone.

Not completely, and not fully so. But alone, for the first time in a long time. It was what I feared the most. But...

I feel happy this way, though I struggle to earn the money to survive, and the frustration only makes the impatience more lethal. I'm in a curious place where I can see my own desperation and understand its futility, yet in the moment, the exhaustion takes over. I have tried to be submissive to get along; I would rather starve. How I got here was seeking freedom. I found it, but I didn't expect it to be so difficult to get anywhere from zero. I get confused when I read my resume, because I can't understand how I would get turned away to even clerical jobs. I can discuss the art of keeping and sharing secrets for hours; but that is not a marketable skill.

What is my cheerful price? I just don't know if I have one anymore. But I'm still alive, and I'm still here. Why I'm here precisely this evening is because I was out in the backyard from the home I rent a room in trying to smoke a six year old cigarette. I don't even smoke. It was an old pack from an overseas deployment to Qatar that had two left, and a lot of memories. I still sorta feel sick. But I stood outside, and reminded myself perhaps I should try a utilitarian go at utilitarianism, rather than trying to tie in some measure of it into that prior ethical standpoint I established. Perhaps they do not work together, without the capital to support not caring at all how much of it you lose. I feel incredibly undervalued. I feel like others value me well, but my performance is leagues under where it should be. I know I have lost some intuitive edge I had when I was younger, but I have earned in back far better in experience and perspective.

Maybe I feel I made too many mistakes and don't deserve a cheerful price, so I keep taking the painful one. Maybe that's a good definition of depression.

Maybe I'm afraid that if I ask for my cheerful price, they will get offended, or laugh. That might be a good definition of anxiety.

At some point I decided only I can give my cheerful price, now. Otherwise one of those two will stop me in my tracks before it's offered. And to do that, I have to get back to work. Futures open shortly. I will be re-reading the sequences again to regain my pride in my search to not be more correct than everyone else, but at least less wrong.

This was a useful and concrete example of a social technique I plan on using as soon as possible. Being able to explain why is super useful to me, and this post helped me do that. Explaining explicitly the intuitions behind communication cultures is useful for cooperation. This post feels like a step in the right direction in that regard.

Solid post. Comments:

• long; I find it hard to parse as a result. Formatting could be improved significantly to improve skimmability. tldr helps, but if the rest of the post's words are worth their time to read, they could use better highlighting - probably bold rather than italic.
• I'm very unclear how this differs from a happy price. The forking of the term seems unnecessary.
• This concept entered my thinking a long time ago.
• Use of single-currency trade assumes an efficient market; the law of one price is broken by today's exponentially inefficient markets, and so significant gains can be made by doing multicurrency bartering, ie the thing people who don't bring money into it would usually do for a personal services trade. Eg, my happy price in dollars is typically enormous because I would need to pay for a human to aid me, but if you can spare a few minutes of your time in return then I can be dramatically more productive.
• If I could, I would make Kronopath's comment the top comment.

This post introduces the concept of a "cheerful price" and (through examples and counterexamples) narrows it down to a precise notion that's useful for negotiating payment. Concretely:

1. Having "cheerful price" in your conceptual toolkit means you know you can look for the number at which you are cheerful (as opposed to "the lowest number I can get by on", "the highest number I think they'll go for", or other common strategies). If you genuinely want to ask for an amount that makes you cheerful and no more, knowing that such a number might exist at all is useful.
2. Even if you might want to ask for more than your cheerful price, your cheerful price helps bound how low you want the negotiation to go (subject to constraints listed in the post, like "You need to have Slack").
3. If both parties know what "cheerful price" means it's way easier to have a negotiation that leaves everyone feeling good by explicitly signaling "I will feel less good if made to go below this number, but amounts above this number don't matter so much to me." That's not the way to maximize what you get, but that's often not the goal in a negotiation and there are other considerations (e.g. how people feel about the transaction, willingness to play iterated games, etc.) that a cheerful price does help further.

The other cool thing about this post is how well human considerations are woven in (e.g. inner multiplicity, the need for safety margins, etc.). The cheerful price feels like a surprisingly simple widget given how much it bends around human complexity.

Obviously, only low-status people could possibly be damaged by reading something.

Sigh.  There are many things I wish I could unread, cough-Gray-Boy-cough.

That was savagely funny and then suddenly horrifying in two lines.

Q: Technical objection: Surely if you’re asking everybody in the room to name their Cheerful Price for something, you should pay the lowest bidder the second-lowest bid, not pay the lowest bidder their actual bid?

Uhhh… possibly? I’m not actually sure that this logic works the same way when you’re asking people for Cheerful Prices—I think you’re already asking them to nudge the price upwards from “the lowest they’d accept”, which means you don’t have to give them the second-price of the auction in order to ensure they get any gains from trade. It’s a more friendly idiom in general—you’re asking them and trusting them to tell you the truth about what won’t make them say “ow”. And despite that example of the laundry, the whole thing seems more useful for individual interactions than auctions? But you may still have a point. I’ll have to think about it.

It would avoid disincentivizing honesty. And prevent people from regretting honesty.

But I suppose some people prefer interacting based on trust. And that can work too, I think.

I think I've known about happy/cheerful prices for a long time, (from before this post) and yet I find myself using the concept only once or twice a year, and not in a particularly important way. 

This was despite it seeming like a very valuable concept.

I think this is likely because people's happy prices can be quite high (too high to be acceptable) and yet it's worth it to still trade at less than this.

What I do think is valuable and this posts teaches, even if it's unintentionally, is you don't have to magically tied to the "market price" or "fair price" – you can just negotiate for what you want.

I think this is a great concept generally. However, I can't think of many situations where I'd personally be able to come up with a "cheerful price" where I'd be happy to do something that I wouldn't do for free.

For example, if a friend asks me to bake a cake or drive them to the airport, I wouldn't be more cheerful doing that for, say, $1000 than for free. I'd probably be less cheerful since I know that's a ridiculous price, even if they wanted to pay it. Maybe that's just because I have enough money that a one-off extra $1000 wouldn't have a meaningful impact on how I live my life or maybe it's just that there isn't a strong connection between dollars and my mental state.

I can imagine situations where I would have a "cheerful price" but these mostly involve doing something for a stranger that doesn't take much time or effort. For anything that requires significant time or effort, I'd have to activate my executive functioning to try to balance things rationally. Ultimately, I think money is too abstract to be a good motivator for me. My monkey brain needs some help to translate it into something more tangible than something that merely has the potential to be exchanged for goods and services at some later point.

Baking a cake is the sort of thing I'd do for fun occasionally. If I were on good enough terms with someone that I didn't feel ick about being asked, I hadn't baked anything in the last couple months, and I already had all the ingredients in the house, I'd cheerfully bake someone a cake for zero dollars. Sometimes somebody gives you an excuse to do something you like to do anyway and that's mutually beneficial even without any money changing hands.

Q:  Wait, does that mean that if I give you a Cheerful Price, I'm obligated to accept the same price again in the future?

No, because there may be aversive qualities of a task, or fun qualities of a task, that scale upward or downward with repeating that task.  So the price that makes your inner voices feel cheerful about doing something once, is not necessarily the same price that makes you feel cheerful about doing it twenty times.

I feel like this needs a caveat about plausible deniability. Sometimes the price goes up or down for reasons that I don't want to make too obvious. Like if it turns out you have bad breath, or if my opportunity cost involves mingling with attractive people, or if you behaved badly yesterday and our peergroup has wordlessly coordinated to lightly socially embargo you for a week and I don't want to be seen violating that. Anticipating some complication like that (consciously or not), I might want to hedge my initial price, or if that's mentally taxing, just weasel out of giving the cheerful price at all. 

This is maybe all accounted for when you say that cheerful prices may not work for someone if Tell culture doesn't work for them. I think plausible deniability tends to be pretty important though, even among nerds who virtue signal otherwise.

This concept helped me clarify my thinking around questions like "how much should I charge for doing X" and "how much should I pay to resolve inconvenience Y", in ways that have resulted in substantially changed behavior today.

This is a great post – thanks!

I was also very pleasantly surprised to see who had written it! Does this mean you've returned from the wasteland (Facebook)?

Q: Despite your pretended demurral, I get the sense that you actually hold it against them a bit more than that. Fine, to be wholly frank, I do tend to see the indignant reaction “How dare you price that in money!” as a sign that somebody was brought up generally economically illiterate. I mean, if somebody says, “Sorry, I haven’t attained the stage of enlightenment where explicitly exchanging money stops making me feel bad”, I’m like, “Your feelings are valid! I’m still human in many ways too!” But if they say, “There are some things you can’t put a price on! How dare you!”, I’m like, “This low-decoupling indignation engine will probably have a happier childhood if I rudely walk away instead of trying to explain how the notion of a ‘price’ generalizes beyond things that are explicitly denominated in money.”

That was savage and it felt good to read, for better and for worse. I’d love to see a whole post about this kind of thing. There is a real tension here, perhaps well approximated as a conflict between two cultures. I think I might just default to telling people “I subscribe to a culture that does not have this sacred taboo” and then we either agree to disagree, or we try to convert each other, or we reach some other compromise. Maybe a better approach, if you have the affordance for it, is to describe a previous time when you violated the taboo in a way that is likely to strike them as weird but net positive, rather than simply triggering their disgust reaction. With the obscenity blunted, they might then be more receptive to relaxing the taboo for themself.

I can see scenarios where both participants in a trade would benefit from interacting via Cheerful Prices. I'm trying to think if it's a concept that still works even if one party does not fully buy into it. If I don't feel comfortable thinking about a Cheerful Price to give you, would I be spending some social / friendship capital that I have with you?