An American retail event organised around the proposition that prices are movable, announced weeks in advance, and treated as a national occasion. The same goods, the same shops, a different number.
Name Your Own Price
Priceline built a business on inverting the transaction: the customer states a figure and the seller decides whether to take it. The mechanism only makes sense in a market where nobody believes the listed price is the real one.
The IPO price range
An American company going public announces a range, then builds a book of investor interest, then prices the offering — sometimes above the range, sometimes below. The company does not know what it is worth. It runs a process to find out.
Price discrimination
American economics teaches it as a legitimate and often efficient practice: charging different customers different prices for the same good according to what each will pay. Student discounts, senior rates, coupons, loyalty pricing, regional pricing. The practice is normal enough that most Americans do not notice they are inside it.
OBO
Or Best Offer. Three letters appended to a price in American classified advertising, on Craigslist, in shop windows, on cars parked with a sign. The seller publishes a number and an invitation to ignore it in the same breath.
The appraisal
American real estate, insurance and estate practice depends on professional appraisers, and their figures are routinely challenged, revised and appealed. An appraisal is an opinion with a number attached, and everyone treats it as such.
Comps
Comparable sales. The standard American method for pricing a house, a business or a piece of art: find what similar things recently sold for. The method locates value in a relationship between transactions rather than in the thing itself.
The ticker
American financial markets publish a continuously changing price for every listed security, and the process is called price discovery. The word discovery is doing the work. The price is not set and then announced. It is found, repeatedly, and it is never final.
eBay
A company built on the premise that nobody knows what a thing is worth until people bid on it. The seller sets a starting price, which is understood by everyone involved to be a floor rather than a valuation.
Surge pricing
The price of a ride changes with demand, minute to minute, and the passenger is shown a multiplier before accepting. It generated substantial public complaint and it did not go away. The argument that won was that the price is doing its job.