What You Pay For
The second-cheapest model is usually the one built for volume
Ranges are constructed so that the entry model exists to set a price and the top model exists to make the middle look reasonable.…
Rithvik Nandan
Contributing writer, Best Pro Deals
Rithvik writes about research method and how to read a review sceptically.
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12 articles
What You Pay For
The price curve flattens, and you can usually see where
Spending more improves a product steeply at first and then hardly at all. The flattening point is category-specific, knowable, and…
What You Pay For
Buying for the fortnight you use it hardest
Most people size a purchase to the heaviest thing they will ever ask of it. That is sometimes correct and frequently expensive, and…
Doing the Research
Affiliate economics decide which products get covered at all
The most consequential bias in product journalism is not what reviewers say. It is the invisible filter deciding which products are…
Doing the Research
Telling a tested review from a rewritten specification sheet
A great deal of published reviewing is a specification list with adjectives added. The differences between that and genuine testing…
Doing the Research
The shape of a rating distribution says more than the average
A four-star average can describe a consistent product or a lottery. The histogram is published on most listings and almost nobody…
Doing the Research
Read the manual before you own the thing
Manuals are published online for almost every product and are written by engineers rather than marketers. They contain the…
Doing the Research
Certification marks: which ones were tested and which were declared
Some marks mean an independent laboratory tested a sample. Others mean the manufacturer signed a statement. They look similar and…
What You Pay For
A bundle is a way of selling you the accessory you would not have chosen
Kits and packages are assembled by the seller, not by you. What is in the box tells you what the seller wanted to move, and the…
Doing the Research
The footnote is where the conditions of every claim are kept
Marketing states the result and the small print states what produced it. The two are written by different people for different…
Doing the Research
Recall registers are public and almost nobody reads them
Safety notices are published by national authorities in searchable form. They describe faults in specific batches of specific…
Doing the Research
What a video review can show you, and what the camera cannot
Video is uniquely good at some kinds of product evidence and structurally incapable of others. Knowing which is which turns an hour…