Value Based Pricing Quotes

Before I met Mr. Shoaff, I used to ask, “How much does it cost?” But he taught me to ask, “What is it worth?” When I started to base my life on value instead of price, all kinds of things began to happen.

No, the majority of people just survive, they think their things have a value but nothing does. Things only have a price, based on expectation, and I do business with that. The only thing of value on Earth is time. One second will always be a second, there’s no negotiating with that.

Shopping the equity market solely based on stock prices is like shopping for groceries solely based on food prices as opposed to the quality of the food. Price matters, but what really matters is the value that you get for the price.

The realms of dating, marriage, and sex are all marketplaces, and we are the products. Some may bristle at the idea of people as products on a marketplace, but this is an incredibly prevalent dynamic. Consider the labor marketplace, where people are also the product. Just as in the labor marketplace, one party makes an offer to another, and based on the terms of this offer, the other person can choose to accept it or walk. What makes the dating market so interesting is that the products we are marketing, selling, buying, and exchanging are essentially our identities and lives. As with all marketplaces, every item in stock has a value, and that value is determined by its desirability. However, the desirability of a product isn’t a fixed thing—the desirability of umbrellas increases in areas where it is currently raining while the desirability of a specific drug may increase to a specific individual if it can cure an illness their child has, even if its wider desirability on the market has not changed. In the world of dating, the two types of desirability we care about most are: - Aggregate Desirability: What the average demand within an open marketplace would be for a relationship with a particular person. - Individual Desirability: What the desirability of a relationship with an individual is from the perspective of a specific other individual. Imagine you are at a fish market and deciding whether or not to buy a specific fish: - Aggregate desirability = The fish’s market price that day - Individual desirability = What you are willing to pay for the fish Aggregate desirability is something our society enthusiastically emphasizes, with concepts like “leagues.” Whether these are revealed through crude statements like, “that guy's an 8,” or more politically correct comments such as, “I believe she may be out of your league,” there is a tacit acknowledgment by society that every individual has an aggregate value on the public dating market, and that value can be judged at a glance. When what we have to trade on the dating market is often ourselves, that means that on average, we are going to end up in relationships with people with an aggregate value roughly equal to our own (i.e., individuals “within our league”). Statistically speaking, leagues are a real phenomenon that affects dating patterns. Using data from dating websites, the University of Michigan found that when you sort online daters by desirability, they seem to know “their place.” People on online dating sites almost never send a message to someone less desirable than them, and on average they reach out to prospects only 25% more desirable than themselves. The great thing about these markets is how often the average desirability of a person to others is wildly different than their desirability to you. This gives you the opportunity to play arbitrage with traits that other people don’t like, but you either like or don’t mind. For example, while society may prefer women who are not overweight, a specific individual within the marketplace may prefer obese women, or even more interestingly may have no preference. If a guy doesn’t care whether his partner is slim or obese, then he should specifically target obese women, as obesity lowers desirability on the open marketplace, but not from his perspective, giving him access to women who are of higher value to him than those he could secure within an open market.

Shopping the equity market solely based on stock prices is like shopping at the grocery store solely based on food prices instead of based on the quality of food — you may end up with a full pantry, and poor health. Price matters. But it’s really about the value that you get for the price.

The consequences of this amassing of fortunes were first felt in the catastrophe experienced by small farmers in Europe and England. The peasants became impoverished, dependent workers crowded into city slums. For the first time in human history, the majority of Europeans depended for their livelihood on a small wealthy minority, a phenomenon that capitalist-based colonialism would spread worldwide. The symbol of this new development, indeed its currency, was gold. Gold fever drove colonizing ventures, organized at first in pursuit of the metal in its raw form. Later the pursuit of gold became more sophisticated, with planters and merchants establishing whatever conditions were necessary to hoard as much gold as possible. Thus was born an ideology: the belief in the inherent value of gold despite its relative uselessness in reality. Investors, monarchies, and parliamentarians devised methods to control the processes of wealth accumulation and the power that came with it, but the ideology behind gold fever mobilized settlers to cross the Atlantic to an unknown fate. Subjugating entire societies and civilizations, enslaving whole countries, and slaughtering people village by village did not seem too high a price to pay, nor did it appear inhumane. The systems of colonization were modern and rational, but its ideological basis was madness.

Although over the short term, Mr. Market may set stock prices based on emotion, over the long term, it is the value of the company that becomes most important to Mr. Market.

My political ideology is based on the value of freedom, rather than its price.

Having a Grand Slam offer makes it almost impossible to lose. But why? What gives it such an impact? In short, having a Grand Slam Offer helps with all three of the requirements for growth: getting more customers, getting them to pay more, and getting them to do so more times. How? It allows you to differentiate yourself from the marketplace. In other words, it allows you to sell your product based on VALUE not on PRICE. Commoditized = Price Driven Purchases (race to the bottom) Differentiated = Value Driven Purchases (sell in a category of one with no comparison. Yes, market matters, which I will expound on in the next chapter) A commodity, as I define it, is a product available from many places. For that reason, it’s prone to purchases based on “price” instead of “value.” If all products are “equal,” then the cheapest one is the most valuable by default. In other words, if a prospect compares your product to another and thinks “these are pretty much the same, I’ll buy the cheaper one,” then they commoditized you. How embarrassing! But

If the market were a disciplined calculator of value based exclusively on company fundamentals, the price of a security wouldn’t fluctuate much more than the issuer’s current earnings and the outlook for earnings in the future. In fact, the price generally should fluctuate less than earnings, since quarter-to-quarter changes in earnings often even out in the long run and, besides, don’t necessarily reflect actual changes in the company’s long-term potential.

They asked forty-two experienced investors in the firm to estimate the fair value of a stock (the price at which the investors would be indifferent to buying or selling). The investors based their analysis on a one-page description of the business; the data included simplified profit and loss, balance sheet, and cash flow statements for the past three years and projections for the next two. Median noise, measured in the same way as in the insurance company, was 41%. Such large differences among investors in the same firm, using the same valuation methods, cannot be good news.

The ‘Regal Seven (key) Ingredients of a Successful Company’ is: Pursue the goal of Profit Maximization keeping in mind the shareholders interests. To be achieved by developing and rendering Quality Goods and Services at a Reasonable Price. By inculcating Value and Ethics within the structure Through Sound People Management principles devised and effectively implemented. Further organizing Learning Programs and instill concept of ‘Learning and Earning’ Develop/Construct Customer Satisfaction. Build-Build-Build ; Build vision based values, Build your staff, Build customer satisfaction ; and witness your organization being built in the market.

Yet, during the last forty years, its contributions have been obscured by the rise of ‘macro-economics’, which seeks causal connections between hypothetically measurable entities or statistical aggregates. These may sometimes, I concede, indicate some vague probabilities, but they certainly do not explain the processes involved in generating them. But because of the delusion that macro-economics is both viable and useful (a delusion encouraged by its extensive use of mathematics, which must always impress politicians lacking any mathematical education, and which is really the nearest thing to the practice of magic that occurs among professional economists) many opinions ruling contemporary government and politics are still based on naive explanations of such economic phenomena as value and prices, explanations that vainly endeavour to account for them as ‘objective’ occurrences independent of human knowledge and aims.

When we subtract two numbers, say, 9 − 6, the time that we take is directly proportional to the size of the subtracted number34—so it takes longer to perform 9 − 6 than, say, 9 − 4 or 9 − 2. Everything happens as if we have to mentally move along the number line, starting from the first number and taking as many steps as the second number: the further we have to go, the longer we take. We do not crunch symbols like a digital computer; instead, we use a slow and serial spatial metaphor, motion along the number line. Likewise, when we think of a price, we cannot help but attribute to it a fuzzier value when the number gets larger—a remnant of our primate-based number sense, whose precision decreases with number size.35 This is why, against all rationality, when we negotiate, we are ready to give up a few thousand dollars on the price of an apartment and, the same day, bargain a few quarters on the price of bread: the level of imprecision that we tolerate is proportional to a number’s value, for us just as for macaques.

Two years after the accident, the USSR acknowledged that the Chernobyl disaster had so far cost them 11 billion Roubles (at a time when a Rouble wasn’t far off the value of a Dollar), while Gorbachev himself admitted a figure of 18 billion in 2006. That does not include a lot of secondary expenses, and even then it appears to be a significant under-estimation, based on a report released by the Belarus Foreign Ministry in 2009. It revealed that the Government there still spends roughly $1 million daily on the accident, and, “damage caused by the Chernobyl disaster is estimated at some $235 billion. However, the overall amount of money that Belarus and the international community invested into the recovery amounts to just 8 per cent of the total damage.275” The cost was catastrophic for the Soviet economy, as were its cascading effects on the coal and hydro energy industries. Soon after this, the oil price crashed to around half of its previous value, damaging the economy still further. The accident gave Gorbachev the excuse he needed to remove many high-ranking military and political opponents to his more transparent vision for the Communist Party, helping to further usher in the era of ‘glasnost’ - transparency. The USSR never recovered; Chernobyl is seen as one of the primary catalysts behind its collapse.

It was the secret no one told you, the thing you had to learn for yourself: viz. that in the antiques trade there was really no such thing as a “correct” price. Objective value—list value—was meaningless. If a customer came in clueless with money in hand (as most of them did) it didn’t matter what the books said, what the experts said, what similar items at Christie’s had recently gone for. An object—any object—was worth whatever you could get somebody to pay for it. In consequence, I’d started going through the store, removing some tags (so the customer would have to come to me for the price) and changing others—not all, but some. The trick, as I discovered through trial and error, was to keep at least a quarter of the prices low and jack up the rest, sometimes by as much as four and five hundred percent. Years of abnormally low prices had built up a base of devoted customers; leaving a quarter of the prices low kept them devoted, and ensured that people hunting for a bargain could still find one, if they looked. Leaving a quarter of the prices low also meant that, by some perverse alchemy, the marked-up prices seemed legitimate in comparison: for whatever reason, some people were more apt to put out fifteen hundred bucks for a Meissen teapot if it was placed next to a plainer but comparable piece selling (correctly, but cheaply) for a few hundred.

the markets was much more fun than having a real job. As long as my basic living expenses were covered, I knew I’d be happy. In 1977, Barbara and I decided to have a child, so we got married. We moved into a rented brownstone in Manhattan and I moved the company there too. The Russians were buying lots of grain at the time and wanted my advice, so I took Barbara on a combined honeymoon–business trip to the USSR. We arrived in Moscow on New Year’s Eve and rode by bus from the drab airport through a dusting of snow, past St. Basil’s Cathedral to a big party with a lot of incredibly friendly, fun-loving Russians. My business has always been a way to get me into exotic places and allow me to meet interesting people. If I make any money from those trips, that’s just icing on the cake. MODELING MARKETS AS MACHINES I was really getting my head into the livestock, meat, grain, and oilseed markets. I loved them because they were concrete and less subject than stocks to distorted perceptions of value. While stocks could stay too high or too low because “greater fools” kept buying or selling them, livestock ended up on the meat counter where it would be priced based on what consumers were willing to pay. I could visualize the processes that led to those sales and see the relationships underlying them. Since livestock eat grain (mostly corn) and soymeal, and since corn and soybeans compete for acreage, those markets

Statisticians say that stocks with healthy dividends slightly outperform the market averages, especially on a risk-adjusted basis. On average, high-yielding stocks have lower price/earnings ratios and skew toward relatively stable industries. Stripping out these factors, generous dividends alone don’t seem to help performance. So, if you need or like income, I’d say go for it. Invest in a company that pays high dividends. Just be sure that you are favoring stocks with low P/Es in stable industries. For good measure, look for earnings in excess of dividends, ample free cash flow, and stable proportions of debt and equity. Also look for companies in which the number of shares outstanding isn’t rising rapidly. To put a finer point on income stocks to skip, reverse those criteria. I wouldn’t buy a stock for its dividend if the payout wasn’t well covered by earnings and free cash flow. Real estate investment trusts, master limited partnerships, and royalty trusts often trade on their yield rather than their asset value. In some of those cases, analysts disagree about the economic meaning of depreciation and depletion—in particular, whether those items are akin to earnings or not. Without looking at the specific situation, I couldn’t judge whether the per share asset base was shrinking over time or whether generally accepted accounting principles accounting was too conservative. If I see a high-yielder with swiftly rising share counts and debt levels, I assume the worst.

In a civilization frankly materialistic and based upon property, not soul, it is inevitable that property shall be exalted over soul, that crimes against property shall be considered far more serious than crimes against the person. To pound one's wife to a jelly and break a few of her ribs is a trivial offence compared with sleeping out under the naked stars because one has not the price of a doss. The following illustrative cases are culled from the police court reports for a single week: South-western Police Court, London. Before Mr. Rose. John Probyn, charged with doing grievous bodily harm to a constable. Prisoner had been kicking his wife, and also assaulting another woman who protested against his brutality. The constable tried to persuade him to go inside his house, but prisoner suddenly turned upon him, knocking him down by a blow on the face, kicking him as he lay on the ground, and attempting to strangle him. Finally the prisoner deliberately kicked the officer in a dangerous part, inflicting an injury which will keep him off duty for a long time to come. Six weeks. Lambeth Police Court, London. Before Mr. Hopkins. 'Baby' Stuart, aged nineteen, described as a chorus girl, charged with obtaining food and lodging to the value of 5s., by false pretences, and with intent to defraud Emma Brasier. Emma Brasier, complainant, lodging-house keeper of Atwell Road. Prisoner took apartments at her house on the representation that she was employed at the Crown Theatre. After prisoner had been in her house two or three days, Mrs. Brasier made inquiries, and, finding the girl's story untrue, gave her into custody. Prisoner told the magistrate that she would have worked “had she not had such bad health. Six weeks hard labor.

Professor Joseph Stiglitz, former Chief Economist of the World Bank, and former Chairman of President Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers, goes public over the World Bank’s, “Four Step Strategy,” which is designed to enslave nations to the bankers. I summarise this below, 1. Privatisation. This is actually where national leaders are offered 10% commissions to their secret Swiss bank accounts in exchange for them trimming a few billion dollars off the sale price of national assets. Bribery and corruption, pure and simple. 2. Capital Market Liberalization. This is the repealing any laws that taxes money going over its borders. Stiglitz calls this the, “hot money,” cycle. Initially cash comes in from abroad to speculate in real estate and currency, then when the economy in that country starts to look promising, this outside wealth is pulled straight out again, causing the economy to collapse. The nation then requires International Monetary Fund (IMF) help and the IMF provides it under the pretext that they raise interest rates anywhere from 30% to 80%. This happened in Indonesia and Brazil, also in other Asian and Latin American nations. These higher interest rates consequently impoverish a country, demolishing property values, savaging industrial production and draining national treasuries. 3. Market Based Pricing. This is where the prices of food, water and domestic gas are raised which predictably leads to social unrest in the respective nation, now more commonly referred to as, “IMF Riots.” These riots cause the flight of capital and government bankruptcies. This benefits the foreign corporations as the nations remaining assets can be purchased at rock bottom prices. 4. Free Trade. This is where international corporations burst into Asia, Latin America and Africa, whilst at the same time Europe and America barricade their own markets against third world agriculture. They also impose extortionate tariffs which these countries have to pay for branded pharmaceuticals, causing soaring rates in death and disease.

gave up on the idea of creating “socialist men and women” who would work without monetary incentives. In a famous speech he criticized “equality mongering,” and thereafter not only did different jobs get paid different wages but also a bonus system was introduced. It is instructive to understand how this worked. Typically a firm under central planning had to meet an output target set under the plan, though such plans were often renegotiated and changed. From the 1930s, workers were paid bonuses if the output levels were attained. These could be quite high—for instance, as much as 37 percent of the wage for management or senior engineers. But paying such bonuses created all sorts of disincentives to technological change. For one thing, innovation, which took resources away from current production, risked the output targets not being met and the bonuses not being paid. For another, output targets were usually based on previous production levels. This created a huge incentive never to expand output, since this only meant having to produce more in the future, since future targets would be “ratcheted up.” Underachievement was always the best way to meet targets and get the bonus. The fact that bonuses were paid monthly also kept everyone focused on the present, while innovation is about making sacrifices today in order to have more tomorrow. Even when bonuses and incentives were effective in changing behavior, they often created other problems. Central planning was just not good at replacing what the great eighteenth-century economist Adam Smith called the “invisible hand” of the market. When the plan was formulated in tons of steel sheet, the sheet was made too heavy. When it was formulated in terms of area of steel sheet, the sheet was made too thin. When the plan for chandeliers was made in tons, they were so heavy, they could hardly hang from ceilings. By the 1940s, the leaders of the Soviet Union, even if not their admirers in the West, were well aware of these perverse incentives. The Soviet leaders acted as if they were due to technical problems, which could be fixed. For example, they moved away from paying bonuses based on output targets to allowing firms to set aside portions of profits to pay bonuses. But a “profit motive” was no more encouraging to innovation than one based on output targets. The system of prices used to calculate profits was almost completely unconnected to the value of new innovations or technology. Unlike in a market economy, prices in the Soviet Union were set by the government, and thus bore little relation to value. To more specifically create incentives for innovation, the Soviet Union introduced explicit innovation bonuses in 1946. As early as 1918, the principle had been recognized that an innovator should receive monetary rewards for his innovation, but the rewards set were small and unrelated to the value of the new technology. This changed only in 1956, when it was stipulated that the bonus should be proportional to the productivity of the innovation. However, since productivity was calculated in terms of economic benefits measured using the existing system of prices, this was again not much of an incentive to innovate. One could fill many pages with examples of the perverse incentives these schemes generated. For example, because the size of the innovation bonus fund was limited by the wage bill of a firm, this immediately reduced the incentive to produce or adopt any innovation that might have economized on labor.

The adjective “efficient” in “efficient markets” refers to how investors use information. In an efficient market, every titbit of new information is processed correctly and immediately by investors. As a result, market prices react instantly and appropriately to any relevant news about the asset in question, whether it is a share of stock, a corporate bond, a derivative, or some other vehicle. As the saying goes, there are no $100 bills left on the proverbial sidewalk for latecomers to pick up, because asset prices move up or down immediately. To profit from news, you must be jackrabbit fast; otherwise, you’ll be too late. This is one rationale for the oft-cited aphorism “You can’t beat the market.” An even stronger form of efficiency holds that market prices do not react to irrelevant news. If this were so, prices would ignore will-o’-the-wisps, unfounded rumors, the madness of crowds, and other extraneous factors—focusing at every moment on the fundamentals. In that case, prices would never deviate from fundamental values; that is, market prices would always be “right.” Under that exaggerated form of market efficiency, which critics sometimes deride as “free-market fundamentalism,” there would never be asset-price bubbles. Almost no one takes the strong form of the efficient markets hypothesis (EMH) as the literal truth, just as no physicist accepts Newtonian mechanics as 100 percent accurate. But, to extend the analogy, Newtonian physics often provides excellent approximations of reality. Similarly, economists argue over how good an approximation the EMH is in particular applications. For example, the EMH fits data on widely traded stocks rather well. But thinly traded or poorly understood securities are another matter entirely. Case in point: Theoretical valuation models based on EMH-type reasoning were used by Wall Street financial engineers to devise and price all sorts of exotic derivatives. History records that some of these calculations proved wide of the mark.

worth, based on the value of its businesses. A speculator gambles that a stock will go up in price because somebody else will pay even more for it.

In essence, then, the common picture of economic thought after Smith needs to be reversed. In the conventional view, Adam Smith, the towering founder, by his theoretical genius and by the sheer weight of his knowledge of institutional facts, single-handedly created the discipline of political economy as well as the public policy of the free market, and did so out of a jumble of mercantilist fallacies and earlier absurd scholastic notions of a 'just price'. The real story is almost the opposite. Before Smith, centuries of scholastic analysis had developed an excellent value theory and monetary theory, along with corresponding free market and hard-money conclusions. Originally embedded among the scholastics in a systematic framework of property rights and contract law based on natural law theory, economic theory

Society means a community of ideas; without shared ideas on politics, morals, and ethics no society can exist. Each one of us has ideas about what is good and what is evil; they cannot be kept private from the society in which we live. If men and women try to create a society in which there is no fundamental agreement about good and evil they will fail; if having based it upon a common set of core values, they surrender those values, it will disintegrate. For society is not something that can be kept together physically; it is held by the invisible but fragile bonds of common beliefs and values. … A common morality is part of the bondage of a good society, and that bondage is part of the price of society which mankind must pay.

A poor selling process means that the correct decision makers never hear the value proposition. The people who do—usually the procurement team—may well claim not to care about value, only price.

Gold is often sought as a refuge during times of financial travail. True to form, the price of the precious metal more than tripled in the 1999-2009 decade. But gold is largely a rank speculation, for its price is based solely on market expectations. Gold provides no internal rate of return. Unlike stocks and bonds, gold provides none of the intrinsic value that is created for stocks by earnings growth and dividend yields, and for bonds by interest payments. So in the two centuries plus shown in the chart, the initial $10,000 investment in gold grew to barely $26,000 in realterms. In fact, since the peak reached during its earlier boom in 1980, the price of gold has lost nearly 40 percent of its real value.

The market made up new standards as it went along, by accepting the current price - however high - as the sole measure of value. Any idea of safety based on this uncritical approach was clearly illusory and replete with danger.

I have never known a great trader, with his first reputation established as a bear operator, who did not either turn bull or drop out of the market altogether.

The price paid for this flexibility is the difficulty of analyzing permissions in ABAC—at any given time, which resources can a given user access, and the converse—for each resource, what users have access? These questions are critical in estimating the risk that some resources will be improperly accessed. One of the complaints with current ABAC implementations is that an overnight run may be needed to determine user–permission links. Worse, in systems where attribute values change rapidly, it may take longer to analyze permissions than it does for a large set of attributes to change their values. As a result, administrators may not be able to determine who has access to what resources at a given moment.

Nearly all the bull markets had a number of well-defined characteristics in common, such as (1) a historically high price level, (2) high price/earnings ratios, (3) low dividend yields as against bond yields, (4) much speculation on margin, and (5) many offerings of new common-stock issues of poor quality. Thus to the student of stock-market history it appeared that the intelligent investor should have been able to identify the recurrent bear and bull markets, to buy in the former and sell in the latter, and to do so for the most part at reasonably short intervals of time. Various methods were developed for determining buying and selling levels of the general market, based on either value factors or percentage movements of prices or both. But we must point out that even prior to the unprecedented bull market that began in 1949, there were sufficient variations in the successive market cycles to complicate and sometimes frustrate the desirable process of buying low and selling high. The most notable of these departures, of course, was the great bull market of the late 1920s, which threw all calculations badly out

The first instinct of many entrepreneurs is to price lower for a competitive edge. The better way to price is based on perceived value to the customer. Understand what your customers want, know your competition, and know the competitive value you offer. Then know how to sell value and set your price to value.

The market’s behavior in the past 20 years has not followed the former pattern, nor obeyed what once were well-established danger signals, nor permitted its successful exploitation by applying old rules for buying low and selling high. Whether the old, fairly regular bull-and-bear-market pattern will eventually return we do not know. But it seems unrealistic to us for the investor to endeavor to base his present policy on the classic formula—i.e., to wait for demonstrable bear-market levels before buying any common stocks. Our recommended policy has, however, made provision for changes in the proportion of common stocks to bonds in the portfolio, if the investor chooses to do so, according as the level of stock prices appears less or more attractive by value standards.

Blockbusting, the subsequent loss of home values when speculators caused panic, the subsequent deterioration of neighborhood quality when African Americans were forced to pay excessive prices for housing, the resulting identification of African Americans with slum conditions, and the resulting white flight to escape the possibility of those conditions all had their bases in federal government policy. Blockbusting could work only because the FHA made certain that African Americans had few alternative neighborhoods where they could purchase homes at fair market values.

After you’ve compared like properties based on price per square foot and location, lot size is the next point of comparison. The larger the lot, the better the resale value–period.

high price for it. Science lacks something very important that religion provides: a moral code. Survival of the fittest is a scientific fact, but it is a cruel ethic; the way of beasts, not a civilized society. Laws can only take us so far, and they must be based upon something—a shared moral code that rises from something. As that moral foundation recedes, so will society’s values.” “I don’t think a person has to be religious to be moral. I’m a scientist, and I’m not… terribly religious… but I’m, or I think I’m, a pretty moral person.” “You’re also much smarter and more empathetic than the vast majority of people. But they will catch up to you someday, and the world will live in peace,

Buying a product or a service is not procurement, that is purchasing. “Procurement” is more multifaceted! “Procurement” will assess needs, define requirements, comb the market and onboard vendors against set criteria. “Procurement” solicits for proposals in formal fashion and allows for a fair competitive ethical environment. “Procurement” contracts based on value for money and maintains full accountability and transparency. To deliver goods and services in the right quality from the right source, at the right price to the right destination at the right time in the quantity and in the right way is not purchasing. All that requires a broad range of strategies, which in one word means “procurement”!

Buying a product or a service is not procurement, that is purchasing. “Procurement” is more multifaceted! “Procurement” will assess needs, define requirements, comb the market and onboard vendors against set criteria. “Procurement” solicits for proposals in formal fashion and allows for a fair, competitive, and ethical environment. “Procurement” contracts based on value for money and maintains full accountability and transparency. To deliver goods and services in the right quality, from the right source, at the right price, to the right destination, at the right time, in the right quantity, and in the right way is not purchasing. The portfolio of strategies required to deliver value for money can be summed up in one word “procurement”!

Because the general prospects of the enterprise carry major weight in the establishment of market prices, it is natural for the security analyst to devote a great deal of attention to the economic position of the industry and of the individual company in its industry. Studies of this kind can go into unlimited detail. They are sometimes productive of valuable insights into important factors that will be operative in the future and are insufficiently appreciated by the current market. Where a conclusion of that kind can be drawn with a fair degree of confidence, it affords a sound basis for investment decisions. Our own observation, however, leads us to minimize somewhat the practical value of most of the industry studies that are made available to investors. The material developed is ordinarily of a kind with which the public is already fairly familiar and that has already exerted considerable influence on market quotations. Rarely does one find a brokerage-house study that points out, with a convincing array of facts, that a popular industry is heading for a fall or that an unpopular one is due to prosper. Wall Street’s view of the longer future is notoriously fallible, and this necessarily applies to that important part of its investigations which is directed toward the forecasting of the course of profits in various industries. We must recognize, however, that the rapid and pervasive growth of technology in recent years is not without major effect on the attitude and the labors of the security analyst. More so than in the past, the progress or retrogression of the typical company in the coming decade may depend on its relation to new products and new processes, which the analyst may have a chance to study and evaluate in advance. Thus there is doubtless a promising area for effective work by the analyst, based on field trips, interviews with research men, and on intensive technological investigation on his own. There are hazards connected with investment conclusions derived chiefly from such glimpses into the future, and not supported by presently demonstrable value. Yet there are perhaps equal hazards in sticking closely to the limits of value set by sober calculations resting on actual results. The investor cannot have it both ways. He can be imaginative and play for the big profits that are the reward for vision proved sound by the event; but then he must run a substantial risk of major or minor miscalculation. Or he can be conservative, and refuse to pay more than a minor premium for possibilities as yet unproved; but in that case he must be prepared for the later contemplation of golden opportunities foregone.

In this way, in a sociality of accelerated circulation but low sign-value, in a game of interaction with neither questions nor responses, power and individuals have no purchase on each other, have no political relationship with each other. This is the price to be paid for flight into the abstraction of the Virtual. But is it a loss? It seems that it is, today, a collective choice. Perhaps we would rather be dominated by machines than by people, perhaps we prefer an impersonal, automatic domination, a domination by calculation, to domination by a human will? Not to be subject to an alien will, but to an integral calculus that absorbs us and absolves us of any personal responsibility. A minimal definition of freedom perhaps, and one which more resembles a relinquishment, a disillusioned indifference, a mental economy akin to that of machines, which are themselves also entirely irresponsible and which we are coming increasingly to resemble. This behaviour is not exactly a choice, nor is it a rejection: there is no longer sufficient energy for that. It is a behaviour based on an uncertain negative preference. Do you want to be free? I would prefer not to ... Do you want to be represented? I would prefer not to ... Do you want to be responsible for your own life? I would prefer not to ... Do you want to be totally happy? I would prefer not to.

Does this seem terribly obvious? Of course it does. But you’d be surprised how many times investors ignore this simple truth. They purchase property based on the seller’s asking price, or something close to it, instead of the operational performance of the property. Here are a few principles about property investing we need to get out on the table right now: • The seller’s asking price is irrelevant. • You determine the property value, which becomes your offer. • With multiple units, the property value is based on the current cash flow of the property.

The family farm is failing because the pattern it belongs to is failing, and the principal reason for this failure is the universal adoption, by our people and our leaders alike, of industrial values, which are based on three assumptions: 1. That value equals price—that the value of a farm, for example, is whatever it would bring on sale, because both a place and its price are “assets.” There is no essential difference between farming and selling a farm. 2. That all relations are mechanical. That a farm, for example, can be used like a factory, because there is no essential difference between a farm and a factory. 3. That the sufficient and definitive human motive is competitiveness—that a community, for example, can be treated like a resource or a market, because there is no difference between a community and a resource or a market. The industrial mind is a mind without compunction; it simply accepts that people, ultimately, will be treated as things and that things, ultimately, will be treated as garbage. Such

Ad-based growth teams should be optimizing pricing in a similarly fluid way. The largest advertising platforms, such as Google and Facebook, use an auction model to set the value of their ad inventory, which essentially means that when advertisers want to place an ad they set a bid price for what they’re willing to pay, then the site gives the ad space to the highest bidder (this is a dramatic oversimplification; the auction processes are dauntingly complex). When that bidder’s budget is exhausted, often by hitting a daily cap or other restriction, the next highest bidder is given the inventory, and so on, until all available inventory is used. These companies also use elements such as ad quality and customer response to factor into which

Dr. Stout explains in her book, The Shareholder Value Myth, “If 80 percent of the CEO’s pay is based on what the share price is going to do next year, he or she is going to do their best to make sure that share price goes up, even if the consequences might be harmful to employees, to customers, to society, to the environment or even to the corporation itself in the long-term.

But Anita Roddick had a different take on that. In 1976, before the words to say it had been found, she set out to create a business that was socially and environmentally regenerative by design. Opening The Body Shop in the British seaside town of Brighton, she sold natural plant-based cosmetics (never tested on animals) in refillable bottles and recycled boxes (why throw away when you can use again?) while paying a fair price to the communities worldwide that supplied cocoa butter, brazil nut oil and dried herbs. As production expanded, the business began to recycle its wastewater for using in its products and was an early investor in wind power. Meanwhile, company profits went to The Body Shop Foundation, which gave them to social and environmental causes. In all, a pretty generous enterprise. Roddick’s motivation? ‘I want to work for a company that contributes to and is part of the community,’ she later explained. ‘If I can’t do something for the public good, what the hell am I doing?’47 Such a values-driven mission is what the analyst Marjorie Kelly calls a company’s ‘living purpose’—turning on its head the neoliberal script that the business of business is simply business. Roddick proved that business can be far more than that, by embedding benevolent values and a regenerative intent at the company’s birth. ‘We dedicated the Articles of Association and Memoranda—which in England is the legal definition of the purpose of your company—to human rights advocacy and social and environmental change,’ she explained in 2005, ‘so everything the company did had that as its canopy.’48 Today’s most innovative enterprises are inspired by the same idea: that the business of business is to contribute to a thriving world. And the growing family of enterprise structures that are intentionally distributive by design—including cooperatives, not-for-profits, community interest companies, and benefit corporations—can be regenerative by design too.49 By explicitly making a regenerative commitment in their corporate by-laws and enshrining it in their governance, they can safeguard a ‘living purpose’ through times of leadership change and protect it from mission creep. Indeed the most profound act of corporate responsibility for any company today is to rewrite its corporate by-laws, or articles of association, in order to redefine itself with a living purpose, rooted in regenerative and distributive design, and then to live and work by it.

This spread between replacement value and liquidation value may be high for real property—often as much as 10 to 20 percent. For instance, I buy a $100,000 painting and pay $7,000 more in sales taxes, for a total of $107,000. The next day I change my mind and sell it for the same price of $100,000, paying $10,000 in commissions, for net proceeds of $90,000. The spread was $90,000 to $107,000, a difference of $17,000 or 17 percent of the “base” price of $100,000. This is what is lost in a round of buying and selling. It’s that way with houses, cars, art, and jewelry. In contrast, the cost to trade listed securities is typically only a small fraction of a percent—which, along with their liquidity, makes them more appealing stores of wealth.

Stock Guide material includes “Earnings and Dividend Rankings,” which are based on stability and growth of these factors for the past eight years. (Thus price attractiveness does not enter here.) We include the S & P rankings in our Table 15-1. Ten of the 15 issues are ranked B+ (= average) and one (American Maize) is given the “high” rating of A. If our enterprising investor wanted to add a seventh mechanical criterion to his choice, by considering only issues ranked by Standard & Poor’s as average or better in quality, he might still have about 100 such issues to choose from. One might say that a group of issues, of at least average quality, meeting criteria of financial condition as well, purchasable at a low multiplier of current earnings and below asset value, should offer good promise of satisfactory investment results.

We were to wine connoisseurs what that great airline, PSA, was to travelers before the airlines were deregulated in 1981. Like us, PSA’s pricing was based on a close reading of FAA regulations, which in those days set the fare for every air route in the U.S. As long as PSA flew only within California, however, they were free of FAA price regulation. PSA had been one of my heroes, and now I was glad to join it in offering great value to our customers.

This configuration provides Walmart with three types of benefits. By placing the stores within a day’s drive of the distribution centers, the company spreads the fixed cost of the central warehouses over a large volume of sales, creating economies of scale. Because the stores are relatively close to one another, delivery trucks can supply them quickly, creating economies of density, a special type of scale economy. For every mile that a store is closer to a distribution center, Walmart’s profit increases $3,500 annually.16 With more than 5,000 stores in the United States alone, economies of density contribute noticeably to the company’s bottom line. Because the stores can be resupplied quickly, they reserve little space for inventory; virtually every inch is dedicated to selling products.17 Walmart’s third advantage highlights the link between market size and fixed costs. In a small market, fixed cost cannot be spread over a large volume of business. As a result, Walmart, the company with the largest share, has a distinct cost advantage. Even if a second firm decided to compete, was able to match Walmart’s infrastructure, and managed to gain significant share, both companies, each saddled with significant fixed cost, would suffer reduced profitability. Anticipating this outcome, potential entrants are reluctant to enter in the first place. In many of the smaller markets, Walmart faced little competition for precisely this reason. Where it was alone, the company raised prices by as much as 6 percent.18

To begin this conversation in your company, take a piece of paper, draw a value stick, and ask three simple questions. What do we do to move WTP? How do we change WTS? What are the connections between our value drivers, prices, and costs?

Connecting the dots—seeing the connections between your value drivers, prices, and cost (be they positive, neutral, or negative)—is an important step in assessing the true attractiveness of a strategic move.

As long as the price increase is smaller than the rise in WTP, both customers and the company are better off. At the bottom of the value stick, companies create more attractive working conditions to lower WTS. They then share this value by reducing compensation. As long as the drop in WTS is greater than the reduction in salaries, both employees and the company are better off.

Six key themes The real reset has gone much deeper and encompasses six key themes, all of which are linked: 1) The shift from a push system, based on producer dominance, oligopolistic competition, limited supply and restricted access, to a pull system driven by consumer dominance, near-perfect competition, perfect knowledge and ubiquitous access to goods. 2) The change from mass marketing, based on a few research and segmentation studies, to personalized marketing, based on individual customer data. 3) The realization that the e-commerce revolution and the communications revolution (social media, user reviews, influencers, etc.) has broken the traditional supply chain, with its multiple players – manufacturers, branded wholesalers and retailers – all supping from the margin cup and adding their mark-ups to prices, and replaced it with a shorter and more direct route to market. 5) The realization that the stores channel was not the only, or even best, way of moving goods from factories to consumers. Indeed, that it was inferior to the e-commerce channel in many respects as a pure goods-transmission mechanism. 6) That putting the consumer at the heart of the business model required seeing the different channels as the consumer saw them – not competing, but complementary to each other. 7) That based on this, the traditional model of the store, as a ‘warehouse’ piled high with stock and with just a narrow fringe of branding and customer service on top, was obsolete and that only a ruthless attention to the remaining added value of physical stores could ensure their continued relevance and survival.

Ponzi borrower’ borrows based on the belief that the appreciation of the value of the asset will be sufficient to refinance the debt but could not make sufficient payments on interest or principal with the cash flow from investments. Only the appreciating asset value can keep the Ponzi borrower afloat. If the use of Ponzi finance is general enough in the financial system, then the inevitable default by the Ponzi borrower can cause the financial system to go into seizure when the bubble pops and asset prices stop increasing and the banks/markets stop lending.

Because they have zero price, these services are virtually invisible in the official statistics. They add value to the economy, but not dollars to GDP. And because our productivity data are, in turn, based on GDP metrics, the burgeoning availability of free goods does not move the productivity dial. There’s little doubt, however, that they have real value. When a girl clicks on a YouTube video instead of going to the movies, she’s saying that she gets more net value from YouTube than traditional cinema. When her brother downloads a free gaming app on his iPad instead of buying a new video game, he’s making a similar statement.

In 1738, the Papers of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg carried an essay with this central theme: “the value of an item must not be based on its price, but rather on the utility that it yields.

Skillful investors can get a sense for the risk present in a given situation. They make that judgment primarily based on (a) the stability and dependability of value and (b) the relationship between price and value. Other things will enter into their thinking, but most will be subsumed under these two.

The concept of selling solutions isn’t wrong. It’s based on a valid recognition of the enormous unmet needs most customers have. But very few companies have figured out how to implement the concept profitably. Most failed attempts to deliver solutions have suffered from one of two common flaws. First, many are uncompelling or undifferentiated in the customer’s eyes. Sometimes the word solution is simply code for a consultative selling process or an attempt to pitch some kind of service agreement along with the product. Sometimes the solution is more significant, but undifferentiated. Take outsourcing as an example. Many companies have moved to take over and run some customer function, such as the mail room or call center, and then struggled to make money. The reason: In most cases, this is simply a cost-of-capital or -labor play, based on the notion that the contractor can run the operation more cheaply than the client firm. The function’s role in enhancing the customer’s business scarcely changes. Not surprisingly, this purely cost-based value proposition leads to rapid downward pricing pressure and service commoditization. The other major problem with many attempts to create solutions is their complexity. Once a company has developed a compelling solutions offering, reaching and serving the customer often requires the creation of a highly skilled delivery force that is hard to scale up. The result is a small, marginally profitable operation that clings to relevance on the periphery of the business.

If you have economies of scale, penetration pricing often works best Would your business benefit from economies of scale? (Most web businesses do.) If so, your ideal pricing strategy may be penetration pricing—charging a low price, basing your financial model on eventually reaching market-dominating economies of scale. Supply-side economies of scale mean that your profit margins increase the more you sell, because as you sell more, your cost of sales (unit costs) usually becomes lower, and your fixed costs become a smaller fraction of your overall costs. Demand-side economies of scale mean that the more customers you get, the more value each customer gets from your service, for the following reasons. You may benefit from having a network of customers. For example, if a phone system had only two users, only one type of call could be made (one between User A and User B). If it had three users, then three types of call could be made (A–B, B–C and A-C). If it had twelve users, sixty-six different types of calls could be made. The overall value of a phone system to its users is roughly proportional to the square of the number of users. You may benefit from there being a market of complementary products and services. The project-management web app Basecamp has many integrations, which it promotes on its website. At the bottom of the page, Basecamp shows off how quickly it’s acquiring new users, to persuade other companies to add integrations. You may benefit from having a bigger knowledge base, more forums, or more trained users. The ecosystem of knowledge around a product can be valuable in itself. WordPress grows because it’s easy to find a WordPress developer and it’s easy for those developers to find answers to their questions. You may benefit from the perception that yours is the standard. Users are aware of the value of choosing the ultimate winner—especially when they have to invest time and resources into using your company—so they will be attracted by the perception that you’ll win.

As Dr. Stout explains in her book, The Shareholder Value Myth, “If 80 percent of the CEO’s pay is based on what the share price is going to do next year, he or she is going to do their best to make sure that share price goes up, even if the consequences might be harmful to employees, to customers, to society, to the environment or even to the corporation itself in the long-term.” When we tie pay packages directly to stock price, it promotes practices like closing factories, keeping wages down, implementing extreme cost cutting and conducting annual rounds of layoffs—tactics that might boost the stock price in the near term, but often do damage to an organization’s ability to survive and thrive in the Infinite Game. Buybacks are another often legitimate practice that has been abused by public company executives seeking to prop up their share price.

But being short something where your loss is unlimited is quite different than being long something that you’ve already paid for. And it’s tempting. You see way more stocks that are dramatically overvalued in your career than you will see stocks that are dramatically undervalued. I mean there — it’s the nature of securities markets to occasionally promote various things to the sky, so that securities will frequently sell for 5 or 10 times what they’re worth, and they will very, very seldom sell for 20 percent or 10 percent of what they’re worth. So, therefore, you see these much greater discrepancies between price and value on the overvaluation side. So you might think it’s easier to make money on short selling. And all I can say is, it hasn’t been for me. I don’t think it’s been for Charlie. It is a very, very tough business because of the fact that you face unlimited losses, and because of the fact that people that have overvalued stocks — very overvalued stocks — are frequently on some scale between promoter and crook. And that’s why they get there. And once there — And they also know how to use that very valuation to bootstrap value into the business, because if you have a stock that’s selling at 100 that’s worth 10, obviously it’s to your interest to go out and issue a whole lot of shares. And if you do that, when you get all through, the value can be 50. In fact, there’s a lot of chain letter-type stock promotions that are sort of based on the implicit assumption that the management will keep doing that. And if they do it once and build it to 50 by issuing a lot of shares at 100 when it’s worth 10, now the value is 50 and people say, “Well, these guys are so good at that. Let’s pay 200 for it or 300,” and then they could do it again and so on. It’s not usually that — quite that clear in their minds. But that’s the basic principle underlying a lot of stock promotions. And if you get caught up in one of those that is successful, you know, you can run out of money before the promoter runs out of ideas. In the end, they almost always work. I mean, I would say that, of the things that we have felt like shorting over the years, the batting average is very high in terms of eventual — that they would work out very well eventually if you held them through. But it is very painful and it’s — in my experience, it was a whole lot easier to make money on the long side.

rising stock prices lead to more spending and investment, which raises earnings, which raises stock prices, which lowers credit spreads and encourages increased lending (based on the increased value of collateral and higher earnings), which affects spending and investment rates,

The great irony of 2008 was that our belief in a system of accounting, a belief woven so deeply inside our collective psyche that we’re not even aware of it, made us vulnerable to fraud. Even when done honestly, accounting is sometimes little more than an educated guess. Modern accounting, especially at the big, international banks, has become so convoluted that it is virtually useless. In a comprehensive dissection in 2014, the Bloomberg columnist Matt Levine explained how a bank’s balance sheet is almost impossibly opaque. The “value” of a large portion of the assets on that balance sheet, he noted, is simply based on guesses made by the bank about the collectability of the loans they make, or of the bonds they hold, and the prices that they might fetch on the market, all measured against the offsetting and equally fuzzy valuation of their liabilities and obligations. If a guess is off by even 1 percent, it can turn a quarterly profit into a loss. Guessing whether a bank is actually profitable is like a pop quiz. “I submit to you that there is no answer to the quiz,” he wrote. “It is not possible for a human to know whether Bank of America made money or lost money last quarter.” A bank’s balance sheet, he said, is essentially a series of “reasonable guesses about valuation.” Make the wrong guesses, as Lehman and other troubled banks did, and you end up out of business.

Found business pain creates opportunity. Quantified business pain drives higher price points. Implicated business pain drives urgency. Business pain and urgency finds business Champions. Business champions get you to the Economic Buyer. The Economic Buyer has access to major funds. You sell big deals based on value. The opposite is also true: No discovered pain means a small or no opportunity. No quantified business pain means no cost justification. No implicated business pain means no urgency to buy. No business Champion means no access to the Economic Buyer. No access to the Economic Buyer means no access to major funds. No access to major funds means either selling small deals based on product features or selling no deals.

It is not possible to devalue the body and value the soul. The body, cast loose from the soul, is on its own. Devalued, the body sets up a counterpart economy of its own, based also on the laws of competition, in which it devalues and exploits the spirit. These two economies maintain themselves at each other’s expense, living upon the other’s loss, collaborating without ceasing in mutual futility and absurdity. You cannot devalue the body and value the soul — or value anything else. —Wendell Berry, quoted by Christian Smith et al

In the 1860s, during its civil war, the US suspended gold convertibility and printed paper money (known as “greenbacks”) to help monetize war debts. Around the time the US returned to its gold peg in the mid-1870s, a number of other countries joined the gold standard; most currencies remained fixed against it until World War I. Major exceptions were Japan (which was on a silver-linked standard until the 1890s, which led its exchange rate to devalue against gold as silver prices fell during this period) and Spain, which frequently suspended convertibility to support large fiscal deficits. During World War I, warring countries ran enormous deficits that were funded by central banks’ printing and lending of money. Gold served as money in foreign transactions, as international trust (and hence credit) was lacking. When the war ended, a new monetary order was created with gold and the winning countries’ currencies, which were tied to gold. Still, between 1919 and 1922 several European countries, especially those that lost the war, were forced to print and devalue their currencies. The German mark and German mark debt sank between 1920 and 1923. Some of the winners of the war also had debts that had to be devalued to create a new start. With debt, domestic political, and international geopolitical restructurings done, the 1920s boomed, particularly in the US, inflating a debt bubble. The debt bubble burst in 1929, requiring central banks to print money and devalue it throughout the 1930s. More money printing and more money devaluations were required during World War II to fund military spending. In 1944–45, as the war ended, a new monetary system that linked the dollar to gold and other currencies to the dollar was created. The currencies and debts of Germany, Japan, and Italy, as well as those of China and a number of other countries, were quickly and totally destroyed, while those of most winners of the war were slowly but still substantially depreciated. This monetary system stayed in place until the late 1960s. In 1968–73 (most importantly in 1971), excessive spending and debt creation (especially by the US) required breaking the dollar’s link to gold because the claims on gold that were being turned in were far greater than the amount of gold available to redeem them. That led to a dollar-based fiat monetary system, which allowed the big increase in dollar-denominated money and credit that fueled the inflation of the 1970s and led to the debt crisis of the 1980s. Since 2000, the value of money has fallen in relation to the value of gold due to money and credit creation and because interest rates have been low in relation to inflation rates. Because the monetary system has been free-floating, it hasn’t experienced the abrupt breaks it did in the past; the devaluation has been more gradual and continuous. Low, and in some cases negative, interest rates have not provided compensation for the increasing amount of money and credit and the resulting (albeit low) inflation.

where a = accumulated future value, p = principal or present value, r = rate of return in percentage terms, and n = number of compounding periods. All too often, management teams focus on the r variable in this equation. They seek instant gratification, with high profit margins and high growth in reported earnings per share (EPS) in the near term, as opposed to initiatives that would lead to a much more valuable business many years down the line. This causes many management teams to pass on investments that would create long-term value but would cause “accounting numbers” to look bad in the short term. Pressure from analysts can inadvertently incentivize companies to make as much money as possible off their present customers to report good quarterly numbers, instead of offering a fair price that creates enduring goodwill and a long-term win–win relationship for all stakeholders. The businesses that buy commodities and sell brands and have strong pricing power (typically depicted by high gross margins) should always remember that possessing pricing power is like having access to a large amount of credit. You may have it in abundance, but you must use it sparingly. Having pricing power doesn’t mean you exercise it right away. Consumer surplus is a great strategy, especially for subscription-based business models in which management should primarily focus on habit formation and making renewals a no-brainer. Most businesses fail to appreciate this delicate trade-off between high short-term profitability and the longevity accorded to the business through disciplined pricing and offering great customer value. The few businesses that do understand this trade-off always display “pain today, gain tomorrow” thinking in their daily decisions.

Value #1: Candor What this value means to me: Honestly sharing how I feel and the way I see things. Sharing observations that might not be convenient, but which are true and important to hear. Being honest with myself about who I am, who I enjoy spending time with, and what I want out of life. Speaking out when I see someone being mistreated. Value #2: Courage What this value means to me: Trusting my intuition and being willing to take risks. Standing up for my beliefs even when they are unpopular. Enthusiastically, passionately saying “yes” to the things that I want, instead of searching for excuses to say “no.” Letting my emotions be loud and bold. Taking up space, and taking a huge, hungry bite out of life. Value #3: Inspiration What this value means to me: Observing the world around me, filling myself up with ideas, and sharing my thoughts and passions with the world. Listening to my own creative drive and bursts of insight. Being a light that can guide others, by empowering people to do what is best for themselves. Value #4: Passion What this value means to me: Giving myself the space to feel things deeply. Making time to be sad, angry, resentful, or joyous. No longer filtering emotions based on how others might receive them. Being unashamed of who I am, pursuing the things I desire that feel good, and letting myself leave the situations that distress me.

It wasn’t until the so-called “Marginal Revolution” in the 1880s when three economists, working independently, all concluded that the value of a good is based on what people subjectively think a particular (or “marginal”) unit of that good is worth, which is exactly right. The amount of time or energy it takes to make something doesn’t really matter when it comes to determining its worth. This is tough to grasp, especially for the individuals or company that produced the good and want to sell it for a price that they think is “fair” compensation for their time and labor.

asked a woman what factors she considered when buying a new pair of jeans. She didn’t hesitate to answer. She said, “Fit is my number-one factor.” I then asked her to tell me about the last time she bought a pair of jeans. She said, “I bought them on Amazon.” I asked, “How did you know they would fit?” She replied, “I didn’t, but they were a brand I liked, and they were on sale.” What’s the difference between her two responses? Her first response tells me how she thinks she buys a pair of jeans. Her second response tells me how she actually bought a pair of jeans. This is a crucial difference. She thinks she buys a pair of jeans based on fit, but brand loyalty, the convenience of online shopping, and price (or getting a good deal) were more important when it came time to make a purchase. This story isn’t unique. I’ve asked people these same two questions countless times in workshops. The purchasing factors often vary, but there is always a gap between the first answer and the second. These participants aren’t lying. We just aren’t very good at understanding our own behavior.

Here’s how it is done. Imagine a hypothetical mutual savings and loan, which we’ll call Magic Wand S&L, or MW, with $10 million in liquidation or book value, and net income of $1 million per year. If MW were a stock bank with one million shares outstanding, each share would have a book value of $10 and earn $1 per share, which is 10 percent of book value. Suppose that if there were such a thing as MW stock, it would, as is typical, trade at one times book value, or $10 per share. Management decides to “convert” MW to a stock savings and loan and issue for the first time one million shares of stock at $10 per share, for proceeds of $10 million. After this initial public offering, or IPO, MW has $10 million in new cash plus the $10 million in equity previously owned by the depositors, for a new total of $20 million in equity. Each share now has a book value of $10 cash plus $10 in contributed equity, for a total of $20. What will the new shares sell for in the marketplace? The contributed equity ought to be worth $10 based on the current market price of comparable stock S&Ls and the $10 in cash ought to be worth another $10, so once the public understands this, we expect the new stock to trade at about $20.

Stepped Approach World Class Pricing Inc. (2010) introduced the “Stepped Approach” for the execution of value-based pricing strategy. This approach starts with a Customer Targeting step that leading to mapping value drivers for customers (Value Assessment step). Having defined the business’s value delivery, the next step offers a ‘menu’ with different options available to its customers (Offering Structure step). The success of the ‘menu’ offering depends on the next step – the Value Communication one - as it is important that a clear message be communicated about value delivery to the clients. Successful communication will prompt the negotiation step that will push customers to seek value for themselves which will result in gaining competitive advantage for both the supplier and its customer (Value Negotiation step). Concluding the process is the Price Setting step that allows delivery of value with the offering.

having a Grand Slam Offer helps with all three of the requirements for growth: getting more customers, getting them to pay more, and getting them to do so more times. How? It allows you to differentiate yourself from the marketplace. In other words, it allows you to sell your product based on VALUE not on PRICE.

Standard accounting practices might not factor the value of communities into the value of a firm, but stock markets do. Little by little, the accountants are catching up. A team of experts collaborating with the consulting and accounting firm of Deloitte published research that sorts companies into four broad categories based on their chief economic activity: asset builders, service providers, technology creators, and network orchestrators. Asset builders develop physical assets that they use to deliver physical goods; companies like Ford and Walmart are examples. Service providers employ workers who provide services to customers; companies like UnitedHealthcare and Accenture are examples. Technology creators develop and sell forms of intellectual property, such as software and biotechnology; Microsoft and Amgen are examples. And network orchestrators develop networks in which people and companies create value together—in effect, platform businesses. The research suggests that, of the four, network orchestrators are by far the most efficient value creators. On average, they enjoy a market multiplier (based on the relationship between a firm’s market valuation and its price-to-earnings ratio) of 8.2, as compared with 4.8 for technology creators, 2.6 for service providers, and 2.0 for asset builders.16 It’s only a slight simplification to say that that quantitative difference represents the value produced by network effects.

Fathom.com couldn’t give standard Columbia diplomas to people who took its classes because they didn’t satisfy the second or third criteria. So it inadvertently conducted an experiment to determine the market price of online Columbia courses based only on their educational value. The answer turned out to be: almost nothing. The gates around higher education were more than just physical barriers to entry. There was a wall of regulation, money, habit, and social capital surrounding the industry, keeping competitors at bay. Even as technology wrought profound changes in society around them, hybrid universities grew richer and more expensive than they had ever been.

The Sunk Cost Fallacy In psychology, one of the most well-known self-defeating behaviors is the “sunk cost fallacy.” It explains why people remain stuck in their circumstances even though they would rather be elsewhere. Some examples are staying in an unfulfilling relationship or keeping a safe but boring job even though you have the opportunity to get better employment. The status quo bias describes the human disposition to cling to what we are familiar with instead of reaching for the unknown. Similar to the Pareto Principle (discussed in chapter 17), the concept has its roots in economics and was founded by economists Richard Zeckhauser and William Samuelson. In 1988, they published a series of studies in the Journal of Risk and Uncertainty. The articles highlighted the fact that even though economics attempts to predict the choice a person will take when faced with more than one alternative, in the real world, most people choose to do nothing and carry on as normal.  A more general term for this tendency is ‘inertia.’ Loss Aversion Theory Why is it that we choose to stick with the same jobs, people, and ambitions? A number of reasons have been put forward to explain this behavior. One reason is based on the “loss aversion theory,” which stipulates that in general, people don’t like losing things, and this is true even if the thing they lose wasn’t of high value. Before moving onto something that is perceived as better, we want evidence to prove that it is going to enhance our lives before detaching ourselves from what is not serving us. Although making a change often leads to a more positive outcome, on a subconscious level, we assume that change will do us more harm than good. Even positive change, such as moving to a nicer home or getting married, requires a lot of thought. There is always a cost associated with change, and most of the time, we don’t want to pay the price.

Companies compete for customers by creating superior customer delight. Many companies strive to be best in class. But having better quality and higher WTP is no guarantee for success. What matters is the difference between WTP and price—in other words, customer delight.

greater similarity across firms leads to downward pressure on prices.

Throughout his career, the outspoken Bogle criticized his industry for high prices, misleading advertising practices, and product proliferation that creates little value for investors. In his 2010 book Enough: True Measures of Money, Business, and Life, he summarized Vanguard’s goal and his own personal aspiration: “What I’m battling for—[giving] our citizen/investors a fair shake—is right. Mathematically right. Philosophically right. Ethically right.

As Dr. Stout explains in her book, The Shareholder Value Myth, “If 80 percent of the CEO’s pay is based on what the share price is going to do next year, he or she is going to do their best to make sure that share price goes up, even if the consequences might be harmful to employees, to customers, to society, to the environment or even to the corporation itself in the long-term.

Hubert Joly, a former strategy consultant and most recently CEO of Carlson, a hotel and travel conglomerate, took on the challenge. Recognizing the dire circumstances, Joly and his team devised a plan they dubbed Renew Blue. The core idea was to create more customer value by increasing WTP and improving price perception. Rather than thinking of Best Buy’s more than 1,000 stores as a liability that made it difficult to compete, the company reimagined their role and turned them into assets. Going forward, the stores would serve four functions: points of sale (the traditional role), showrooms for brands that built stores-within-a-store, pickup locations, and mini-warehouses.

Based on his assumption that a bitcoin miner will on average spend 90 percent of the value of the mined bitcoin on electricity, Lane calculated that a $1,000 bitcoin price would result in 8.2 million tons of carbon per year, about the size of Cyprus’s emissions, and that a $100,000 bitcoin price would produce 825 megatons annually, or the equivalent of Germany’s emissions.

Market for Non-Fungible-Tokens (NFTs) has grown significantly and enabled several ways to earn through them. However, with the rise of NFT scams, main problem has arisen in determining the value of an NFT. Knowing the value of an NFT can be helpful in many ways. Here is what you should know about investing in NFTs, determining their worth, and considering several factors that will help you make a profit from NFTs. Understand the pricing of an NFT There is no defined model to evaluate the value of an NFT. In a basic sense, you cannot assess NFTs using the same parameters used to evaluate properties or traditional investment vehicles like shares. Last buyer's payment often provides some indication of the worth. However, with NFTs, it can be challenging to predict what the next buyer will pay based on their predictions. Most buyers depend on guesswork in their bids because they lack the expertise required to estimate the value of NFTs logically. The value of NFTs is influenced over time by a judgment over which both buyers and sellers may have no control. For instance, a piece of NFT art could be in great demand for a period because purchasers believe it to be unique and that its value will rise shortly. Then, suddenly, they may discover that the digital image is publicly available on the Internet and that the NFT would no longer have any clients. So, to avoid these scams, investors should consider these factors to determine the price of an NFT they want to buy or sell. Factors influencing the value of NFTs Artist’s Fame The reputation of the artist who created an NFT is the first element that affects its worth. NFTs produced by well-known or particularly well-liked up-and-coming artists will be valued higher than those produced by lesser-known artists. For example, the value of an old painting by Pablo Picasso will differ by miles from the value of even an impressionist painting by a contemporary street artist. That's just how the art business operates. And with context to NFTs, nothing has changed. Ownership History An NFT's value is highly influenced by the issuer's and past owners' identities. The historical value of tokens created by well-known individuals or businesses is significant. By collaborating with individuals or businesses having a high brand value to issue the NFTs, you can improve the value proposition of the NFT. Another way to get popularity is to resell NFTs already owned by prominent individuals. With the use of a straightforward tracking interface, marketplaces and sellers can assist buyers in learning more about prior NFT owners. Buyers will benefit from seeing the names of investors who profited significantly from NFT trading. Rarity The price of an NFT is strongly correlated with how scarce it is considered to be and how rare it is. Famous artists' original works of art and high-calibre celebrities' tokens are qualified as rare NFTs. NFTs have a significant amount of worth due to their rarity. Any asset with a limited supply has a higher intrinsic value and gives its owner a sense of true uniqueness. In the NFT art market, sellers can demand top pay for this feeling. Liquidity If an asset can be sold when needed without suffering a significant loss in value, it is considered to be liquid. If you view NFT art as an investment rather than a long-term digital collectable, liquidity is a top concern. High liquidity increases an NFT's value, especially for these types of investments. Liquidity can be unpredictable since it is determined by attractiveness and what a buyer is prepared to pay and the characteristics that change as the market does. Look at its recent trading volume to get an indication of what you might expect in terms of NFT liquidity. Systems will be established to maintain asset liquidity as the NFT market expands.

Part of the appeal of markets is that they don't pass judgment on the preferences they satisfy. They don't ask whether some ways of valuing goods are higher, or worthier, than others. If someone is willing to pay for sex or a kidney, and a consenting adult is willing to sell, the only question the economist asks is, "How much?" Markets don't wag fingers. They don't discriminate between admirable preferences and base ones. Each party to a deal decides for himself or herself what value to place on the things being exchanged. This nonjudgmental stance toward values lies at the heart of market reasoning and explains much of its appeal. But our reluctance to engage in moral and spiritual argument, together with our embrace of markets, has exacted a heavy price: it has drained public discourse of moral and civic energy, and contributed to the technocratic, managerial politics that afflicts many societies today.

What is outcome-aligned pricing? Outcome-aligned pricing is a consumption-based revenue model where a product’s pricing is directly linked to the value the customer receives.

Keith was sophisticated enough to understand the inherent risk of options; buying options wasn't as dangerous as short selling, because your potential for loss was capped, because you could always let the options expire. You paid a fee for the right to buy a certain number of shares of a stock at a certain price by a certain date. Sold in 100-share blocks, the fee was based on demand, which related to where people thought the stock price was going. Because the fee you paid for those 100-share blocks was a fraction of the pegged price, you could leverage yourself into a very large position with a relatively small amount of money. If the price went up, you could make a lot; if it went down, your options were worthless, but you only lost what you initially paid. A full 80 percent of the options bought by retail traders like him expired worthless; but when you only had a little to work with, there was no better way to shoot for the moon. Fifty-three thousand dollars was a lot, considering he had a two-year-old, a house, a wife. It was as much money as his dad earned in a year when he was younger. But Keith was that sure, even when the stock was hovering around $5 a share, that he had found value that others had missed.

Why Shiba Inu is losing all its popularity? Several cryptocurrencies are losing their lustre as a result of the crypto crisis. Shiba Inu (SHIB) is one such case, created as an Ethereum-compatible alternative to Dogecoin (DOGE), previously in the top ten digital tokens but currently struggling to pass DOGE in market cap. The dog-based meme coin has declined almost 90%% from its high value of ₹0.0061 in late October 2021. Currently, it is trading around ₹0.000950. Furthermore, the price has not shown any exponential growth in the last several months. Related- What Are Meme Coins | Leading Meme Coins: Dogecoin, Shiba Inu Shiba Inu's overall market capitalization has plummeted to ₹519B. During its peak, it was around ₹3,031B up to five times what it is now. However, because of the token's cheap pricing, trade volumes have remained steady. Last year, Shiba Inu (SHIB) became a worldwide sensation, and everyone wanted to get on board the hype train. Now, that hype is non-existent, and interest in Shiba has vanished. In this article, we will explain why this happened. But first, let's go through some analysis. Google searches and social media mentions As per the google trends, searches for "Shiba Inu" had returned to pre-hype levels in October and November of last year. It's also worth mentioning that "Shiba Inu" refers to a dog breed, after which the cryptocurrency is named. As a result, those interested in the coin itself are likely to be even fewer.’ While many may argue that this is due to the overall downturn in the crypto market (and they would be somewhat correct), Bitcoin and Ethereum did not see such a significant drop in retail interest. According to data, searches for "bitcoin" are down approximately 65% from their 12-month peak, while searches for "Ethereum" are down around 60%. These are significant drops, but nowhere like the 95% drop in interest that Shiba Inu suffered from its 12-month peak.

on your target market and marketplace to optimize sales.  Prompt:  If I want to list this ebook on amazon, can you give me a price point that will maximise the number of sales based on my target audience? ChatGPT Response: Pricing your ebook on Amazon can be a tricky task, as it depends on various factors such as your target audience, competition, and the value that your book offers. However, generally speaking, a lower price point is more likely to result in more sales, as it will make your book more accessible to a wider range of readers. For a non-fiction ebook such as "Unplugged: The Ultimate Guide to Digital Detoxing and Finding Peace in the Modern World", a price point of $2.99 to $4.99 is considered competitive and will likely maximize the number of sales. This price range positions your book competitively against similar books while still being affordable for most readers. It's also important to note that you can change the price of your book from time to time, for example, you can offer discounts or promotions to boost sales, or you can raise the price if you feel it's undervalued. Additionally, you can also offer the book for free for a limited

Why double? Because you are positioning yourself as someone experienced, reliable, who offers what your clients value most, highly recommended by key influencers, and above all, extremely honest to guarantee results based on key concerns (or else you will act responsibly to live up to the credibility you’ve built), not to mention that your time becomes more valuable as the demand increases.

One thing you have to get a handle on when starting any business is charging what you’re worth; based on the value you deliver to your client. This is one of the most challenging areas for entrepreneurs, especially when they’re starting out and in need of money. But trust me, if you start off lowballing your prices it becomes very hard to raise them. You also have to factor in your own overheads, admin and running costs.

the customer-company relationship is based on good value in exchange for a fair price. You simply cannot run a long-term successful business if you don’t seek to improve the condition of your customers and members constantly.

Although over the short term Mr. Market may price stocks based on emotion, over the long term Mr. Market prices stocks based on their value.

you are the one for him/her and the price you pick based on the value you are providing will be absolutely secondary to the core benefits you will provide.

Have the “willingness to pay” talk with customers early in the product development process. If you don't do it early, you won't be able to prioritize the product features you develop, and you won't know whether you're building something customers will pay for until it's in the marketplace. Don't force a one-size-fits-all solution. Whether you like it or not, your customers are different, so customer segmentation is crucial. But segmentation based on demographics—the primary way companies group their customers—is misleading. You should build segments based on differences in your customers' willingness to pay for your new product. Product configuration and bundling is more science than art. You need to build them carefully and match them with your most meaningful segments. Choose the right pricing and revenue models, because how you charge is often more important than how much you charge. Develop your pricing strategy. Create a plan that looks a few steps ahead, allowing you to maximize gains in the short and long term. Draft your business case using customer willingness-to-pay data, and establish links between price, value, volume, and cost. Without this, your business case will tell you only what you want to hear, which may be far afield from market realities. Communicate the value of your offering clearly and compellingly; otherwise you will not get customers to pay full measure. Understand your customers' irrational sides, because whether you sell to other businesses or to consumers, your customers are people. You should take into account their full psyches, including their emotions, in making purchase decisions. Maintain your pricing integrity. Control discounting tightly. If demand for your new product is below expectations, only use price cuts as a last resort, after all other measures have been exhausted. We

We find stories more convincing than statistics. Academic studies tell us that value stocks—those shares that are cheap based on market yardsticks like price-earnings ratios and dividend yield—outperform growth stocks, despite the latter’s rapidly increasing earnings and sales. But academic studies are no competition for a good story: We are still drawn to hot growth companies with their slick innovations and adoring customers.

A stock is not cheap or expensive merely because its price is below or above a particular number. It is cheap or expensive only in relation to the fundamental value of the underlying business, which has nothing to do with whether the share price is near an anchor. If you find yourself getting excited over any investment based purely on its price, you’re anchoring.

remedy the “anarchy” of the market, the socialist planned economy is utterly irrational. Its irrationality is due to the elimination of the essential indices for determining rational production and distribution – namely, prices. Von Mises showed that prices represent the incredibly thick and vital data sets required for allocating productive resources for commodity production and calibrating these to demand. Socialism is irrational because by beginning without prices for the machinery of production, no rational criteria could ever emerge for allocating resources to specific production processes. And when unpriced consumer goods are added to the mix, the chaos multiplies – unless, that is, political force is applied, and it always is. Eliminating prices, the socialist economy cannot provide the feedback loops required for determining what to produce or how much of it to produce. Cancerous, over-sized productive capacities in one sector of the economy are paralleled by relatively anemic productive capacities in another, and so on. And resorting to the labor theory of value won’t fix the problem. The socially average amount of labor time required to produce a commodity, even if it determines a commodity’s value (a doubtful claim in any case), is by no means an adequate index for determining the amount of resources to devote to its production. This means that socialism fails not only at resource allocation but also at the economic representation of the people it claims to champion. Absent price mechanisms, economic “voters,” or consumers, have no way to voice their needs and wants. Production and distribution must be based on the non-democratic decision-making of centralized authorities. Those who really care about the working masses must reject socialism for its incapacity to establish economic democracy, its most fundamental reason for being.

An Offer. This is where the rubber meets the road, so to speak. You have to establish a price and make an offer. Don’t sell yourself short. I price-tested my e-books at $9.99, $19.99, and $29.99. I actually sold more at $19.99 than $9.99. I think this is partly due to the fact people impute value based on price. If you charge more (within reason), they assume the product is worth more. 7. Call to Action. You must ask for the sale. This is known as a call to action. It must be clear, unequivocal, and positioned in a prominent place. I suggest the upper-right-hand corner of the page. Ask yourself, What is the single action I want visitors to this page to take as a result of reading my copy? I indicate my call to action with a big red button. If you are launching a new product, service, or cause, you need a landing page that delivers results. This is essential if you are going to convert readers to customers and, from there, to tribe members. 114 THIRTY-ONE

Organizational leaders often accept and act on two fundamental assumptions. One is that market boundaries and industry conditions are given. You cannot change them. You have to build your strategy based on them. 4 The other is that, to succeed within these environmental constraints, an organization must make a strategic choice between differentiation and low cost. Either it can deliver greater value to customers at a greater cost and hence a higher price, or it can deliver reasonable value at a lower cost. But it can’t do both. Hence, the essence of strategy is seen as making a value-cost trade-off.

In West's guide, rule-of-thumb guidance comes in two formats that most valuation experts recognize:  Percentage of annual sales: If a business had total sales of $ 100,000 last year and the multiple for that business was 40 percent of annual sales, the price based on that particular rule of thumb would be $ 40,000.  Multiple of earnings: An earnings multiplier makes the most sense to prospective buyers. It directly addresses the buyer's motive to make money: to achieve a return on investment. In many small companies, this multiple is commonly used against what is known as seller's discretionary earnings (SDE), which are earnings before accounting for the following items: • Income taxes • Nonrecurring income and expenses • Nonoperating income and expenses • Depreciating an amortization • Interest expense or income • Owner's total compensation for one owner/ operator after adjusting the total compensation of all owners to market value