In *The Planted Price*, author Simon Blackwood reveals how the first number you encounter-a listing

price, an opening bid, a menu anchor-hijacks every judgment that follows, even when you know to ignore it.

Professional appraisers valued the same house thousands of dollars apart based solely on a fabricated number

they were told to disregard; emergency-room physicians locked onto triage notes and missed diagnoses;

negotiators who named a salary first gained an anchoring advantage their counterparts spent the rest of the

conversation trying to escape.

This book documents nine real-world domains where anchoring distorts decisions-real estate, medicine,

hiring, litigation, retail pricing, auctions, credit limits, charitable giving, and forecasting-and provides the

structural overrides that let you judge from evidence before the planted number takes hold.

Readers will discover:

- How professional appraisers appraised identical properties $30,000-$50,000 apart when shown different

listing prices-numbers they explicitly knew were arbitrary

- Why emergency physicians anchor on the first diagnosis suggested in handoff notes, and how that mental

shortcut produces the diagnostic errors patient-safety researchers have catalogued for decades

- The salary-negotiation studies that overturned conventional wisdom: making the first offer isn't a

disadvantage-it sets the anchor the other side must work to escape

- How restaurants engineer menus with one conspicuously expensive dish that pulls every other price

upward without diners recognizing the mechanism

- The three-question audit-what was known independently, what number arrived first, what would

change if that number disappeared-that builds judgment immune to planted reference points