A School of Continuous Improvement survey finds marketplace-forum users share no consensus on what an "or nearest offer" price tag actually promises, and the University's surplus-equipment resale forum has adopted a single discount floor from the survey's most common answer regardless.
A Living Dashboard survey found no consensus on what the tag promises; the University's own resale forum has fixed one number regardless
The School of Continuous Improvement’s Living Dashboard programme has spent much of this year asking a question most people assume is already settled: what does “or nearest offer” actually promise? A survey of marketplace-forum users, led by Dr Marit Osayande, found no such settlement. Respondents’ expected discounts spread across a wide range, with no single figure describing what most people privately mean when they write the phrase on a listing.
A number everyone assumes is shared is exactly the number worth surveying properly. Ours came back wider than anyone expected, and the University has already put it to work.
— Dr Marit Osayande, Lecturer and Convenor, Living Dashboard, School of Continuous Improvement
The University’s own surplus-equipment resale forum, which trades on the same courtesy tag, has not waited for the disagreement to resolve itself. It has adopted the discount most commonly volunteered in the survey as a single, forum-wide “or nearest offer” floor, replacing an assumption nobody had tested with a figure every seller and buyer inside the forum can now be told in advance. Dr Ingrid Vasseur, who worked on the survey design, said the forum’s new floor was “one answer among many the survey turned up, and probably not the one most people would have picked for themselves.”
The full brochure profiling the survey alongside related measurement research from across the University is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.6xin7f.