Not getting a 33 percent discount is the same as paying about 50 percent more.<p>A 33 percent discount on a 100 dollar item makes the price 67 dollars. Not getting the discount makes the price go from 67 to 100, an increase of 33 dollars, which is a 49.25 percent increase.<p>While we're at it, is there a name for when people tell you meaningless things like, "I doubled my sales", only to discover the sales went from 1 unit to 2. It's an error so common that I imagine it must be named by now.
"While we're at it, is there a name for when people tell you meaningless things like, "I doubled my sales", only to discover the sales went from 1 unit to 2. It's an error so common that I imagine it must be named by now."<p>Don't know if it has a word but it has its own xkcd comic.<p><a href="https://xkcd.com/1102/" rel="nofollow">https://xkcd.com/1102/</a>
I'm not quite sure what you're asking, but one way that fractions (and by extension, ratios) are tricky is that a larger denominator gives a smaller value. Five is greater than three but a fifth is smaller then a third. I've seen my children struggling with this.<p><i>"It's an error so common that I imagine it must be named by now."</i><p>Not really an error so much as an attempt to mislead.
This list is rather daunting to check for a match against this example: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases</a>
It's either in this list, or we should describe this bias as new?
If we don't discover a name, I guess we could call the first one the "Small discount, large increase equivalence?" sounds pretty bad. Anything with the word numerator or denominator in it would be far worse.<p>On the second one, "unqualified percentages?"
A good example of "I doubled my sales" would be "My risk of getting cnacer has doubled" - this might mean my risk has gone from 1 in 100,000 people to 2 in 100,000 people.
I found the answer. It is called the Framing effect.
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framing_effect_(psychology)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framing_effect_(psychology)</a><p>I would posit that there could be benefit in naming the more specific form of discount/increase, as its hard to derive benefit from the knowledge of a general "framing effect" as framing is more often non numerical.