The Planted Price

In *The Planted Price*, author Simon Blackwood reveals how the first number you encounter-a listingprice, an opening bid, a menu anchor-hijacks every judgment that follows, even when you know to ignore it.Professional appraisers valued the same house thousands of dollars apart based solely on a fabricated numberthey were told to disregard; emergency-room physicians locked onto triage notes and missed diagnoses;negotiators who named a salary first gained an anchoring advantage their counterparts spent the rest of theconversation trying to escape.This book documents nine real-world domains where anchoring distorts decisions-real estate, medicine,hiring, litigation, retail pricing, auctions, credit limits, charitable giving, and forecasting-and provides thestructural overrides that let you judge from evidence before the planted number takes hold.Readers will discover:- How professional appraisers appraised identical properties $30,000-$50,000 apart when shown differentlisting prices-numbers they explicitly knew were arbitrary- Why emergency physicians anchor on the first diagnosis suggested in handoff notes, and how that mentalshortcut produces the diagnostic errors patient-safety researchers have catalogued for decades- The salary-negotiation studies that overturned conventional wisdom: making the first offer isn’t adisadvantage-it sets the anchor the other side must work to escape- How restaurants engineer menus with one conspicuously expensive dish that pulls every other priceupward without diners recognizing the mechanism- The three-question audit-what was known independently, what number arrived first, what wouldchange if that number disappeared-that builds judgment immune to planted reference points