I'm an Australian, based in the Washington, DC, area of the United States. I spend a lot of time there with Jasmine, Australia's best-known speedsolver of the Rubik's Cube. Prior to the US, Jasmine and I were based in London, UK. We have also lived previously in the United States and Australia.

I have worked for an Australian business rules and compliance company since 1999 in Australia, the US and the UK. I have also lectured in IT and Law related topics at King's College, London, and at The Australian National University.

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These are a few of my favourite links:
- Jasmine's site
- Jasmine's blog
- Mikal
- Daveydweeb
- Beth
- Lyn
- Doug
- Marissa
- Lisaloha
- David (Greenomics)
- Paul's Ramblings (music)

Hits since 1 Sep 2004

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Product sabotage

Tim Harford, of BBC TV's Trust Me: I'm an Economist has written an interesting article on product sabotage for the BBC website. The article talks about a common problem for businesses who want to sell something: they want to sell at the maximum price, but different people have different prices they are willing to pay because each group values different aspects of the product. The trick is to work out what a product is worth to each group in the market and to determine pricing strategies for the separate groups accordingly. Each pricing strategy is based on what is valuable to a particular group. In some cases, customers will demand a lower-priced version, and vendors will remove or disable features to justify a lower price, without cannibalising their own high-end market. This is called "product sabotage" -- but it has the positive effect of making products available to the widest range of people.

Haford describes different ways that businesses can meet this challenge. For example, Starbucks is described as having a smaller "short" coffee which is sold cheaply but not listed on menus; and IBM is described as having sold a downmarket printer which was actually the same as a more expensive printer, but with some of its features turned off.

There is an interesting discussion of the article on Digg. Comments range from predictable complaints about Starbuck's, to a comment that it is best to buy the largest coffee sizes because they are cheaper per millilitre, to a comment that smaller cappuccinos have better foam, to a rant about the evils of taxation, which is said to distort businesses' pricing models!