To Each According To Their Desires

We had Erin of Bearing Blog and her family over to stay for New Years along with another big Catholic family. The three of us guys were all in fairly specialized fields. Erin's husband Mark is a chemical engineer. Matt is a medical physicist dealing with radiation treatments and such. And I do pricing analytics.

There were drinks aplenty. I was bottling a batch of Oatmeal Stout with the other two guys, and Matt had brought a couple bottles of port which he'd made. We are the sort of family which does not have large numbers of surviving glasses from the same set, so when it came time to pour six glasses of port for the six adults, the six wine glasses included four different sizes.

The result was best formulated by Mark in the form of a joke:

The physicist says that we should pour all the glasses to the same height.

The engineer says that we should take into account the different shapes of the glasses and pour to different heights in order to get the same amount of fluid in each glass.

The pricing analyst says we could just pour the glasses unequally and then ask the wives to pick first. They'll want the glasses with the least wine, and then we can have the others.

The glasses were poured and the wives were called back to the kitchen, where they did indeed pick the glasses with less wine. (One even poured some back into her husband's glass.) The men finished with a toast to market segmentation.

And that is why pricing analytics often resides in marketing.