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Dan Ariely, an economist, also has a similar story to share:

As I mention in the video, what's really interesting is that this locksmith was penalized for getting better at his profession. He was tipped better when he was an apprentice and it took him longer to pick a lock, even though he would often break the lock! Now that it takes him only a moment, his customers complain that he is overcharging and they don't tip him. What this reveals is that consumers don't value goods and services solely by their utility, benefit from the service, but also a sense of fairness relating to how much effort was exerted.

Emphasis is mine.

That's actually a marketing trick of a kind of "false choice". I can't remember where I read this but they have done studies involving this and the example was given with newspapers. Basically the idea goes, if they offer 2-3 choices and 1 is very expensive, another very cheap but the third makes it seem like you are getting the expensive plan for less, you think it's a deal in your mind. No one is immune to this, so I'm not singling out you, we've all felt victim to this as it's the natural way our brain makes order.

Ah here it is, it was someone from the Economist:
http://danariely.com/the-books/excerpted-from-chapter-1-%E2%80%93-the-truth-about-relativity-2/

TED video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOhb4LwAaJk

Not necessarily. The questions do not all have 1 point for correct answer. The exam is not multiple choice, it is written. It is difficult for anybody to write answers to a 100 questions in an exam (It is 2 -2.5 hours http://www.cisce.org/notice_doc/55Time-Table-ICSE-2013-Examination.pdf) . So there is mostly only about 20 questions in the exam. This means that there are only a limited number of possible scores you can get in the exam. It is a bit like summing up tennis scores - you will only get multiples of 5 for totals because the scores are all 0,15,30 and 40.
If you are still not convinced, generate random integers from 1-20 in excel.Multiply them by 5 and plot it. You will notice that you have a distribution from 0 - 100, but it is very jagged.
Then there is the fact that the same examiner reads the entire paper, rather than this being split up question-wise. By the time an examiner gets to the end of a paper, the examiner is biased towards thinking the student is good or bad ( Dan Ariely explains it is detail http://danariely.com/tag/the-honest-truth-about-dishonesty/) , so it biases all his scoring for later questions. They are also likely to round up some scores which are border line passes.

The way it is today, you feel like you are at a bazaar and you are being hocked a $10 Rollex; you think to yourself "if this thing breaks even 15 minutes from now I will never see this guy again."

^----------- THIS. That's why apps live and die by their rating: I won't even bother downloading a FREE app if the rating is 2-stars or less.

This is also why I'd rather buy on eBay than Craigslist. Even though Craigslist means I get to go physically touch the item I'm purchasing, if it breaks 5 minutes after leaving then I'm out of luck. At least eBay I have feedback and Paypal that *might* support me.

I have a pretty good idea what my carmel latte will taste like. Movie previews are usually an accurate portrayal of what the movie will be like. I bought a used iPod Touch for $100 before being locked into a iPhone contract so I could see what the big deal was. But I've downloaded some truly horrible apps. Awful, disgusting, WTF apps. Apps I used for a minute and thought "Oh no! This isn't even close to the description!" It's the app equivalent of being rickrolled, and who likes to be rickrolled? Even though it takes only seconds out of your life, no one likes to think they were getting X and they're given Y instead. It comes down to this: no one likes to feel deceived. Lattes don't deceive. Movie previews don't deceive. iPhones/iPads don't deceive. App descriptions sometimes deceive and we don't like it.

I wish the blog post would have mentioned the author's credentials. If anyone else is wondering "Why should we listen to this maniac?" according to his About page he's "Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics at Duke University"

This one I can agree with, that a majority of people will lie to claim as much as they can. It's a basic human nature to be greedy, and finding people who won't lie for greed is hard to do.

Not actually true, peoples' greed is related to a variety of factors, this experiment in which cheating is about as easy as possible and practically condoned, still only 69% of students cheat. In real-life situations with more risk, less reward or that are socially closer to home the percentage will be much less.

It is the concept of "Free" that is getting people. Netflix should have read some of Dan Arielys stuff before doing the price change.

http://danariely.com/2009/08/10/the-nuances-of-the-free-experiment/

The Cost of Social Norms.