"Anchoring," in the context of decision-making and marketing, refers to our tendency to accept a value as a baseline and then compare all future values to that default.
This locking-in of an often arbitrary value has been decently well-supported by evidence over the years, and has been shown to be resilient over time: once we've attached a price to a given model of car, for instance, it can be tricky to shake that loose and replace it with a new value (one experiment demonstrated that it takes, on average, about a week to replace a previous anchor-price with a new one).
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