What Is a Pig Worth?

I recently listened to a Radiolab episode called “What Is a Pig Worth?” It’s a fascinating look at an animal-rights case that forced a jury to grapple with a genuinely hard question. I’m not here to relitigate the case. But near the end, the lawyers started talking about value, and that part got my attention.

They broke it down into three types. There is economic value, which in this case was nearly zero. The piglets were sick, so to the farm, they were a liability. There is emotional value, the kind my dog has to me, or the kind the activists clearly felt for the animals they rescued. And there is inherent value, the idea that a life has worth simply because it exists.

Three types of value. Same piglets. Wildly different amounts of value depending on who you ask and why.

This is exactly what I mean when I say willingness to pay (WTP) is contextual. WTP is not a property of the product. It lives in the person doing the valuing, and it shifts based on who they are, what they care about, and what situation they are in.

Here is the part that really stuck with me. During deliberations, one juror convinced others to imagine holding one of the piglets. That single act changed how people thought about the case. It did not add new information. It shifted the type of value they were applying. Suddenly, the emotional dimension became real instead of abstract, and judgments changed.

Salespeople figured this out a long time ago. They call it the puppy dog close. Let the customer hold the puppy. Let them take the car for a weekend. Let them run the software in their own environment. WTP goes up because the perceived value stops being hypothetical.

The deeper lesson is this: value is not a fixed attribute waiting to be discovered. It is ambiguous by nature. The piglet did not have a value. It had a value to the farm, a different value to the activists, and a different value again to anyone who spent thirty seconds holding it. Context determined everything.

This matters for pricing. We spend enormous energy calculating and communicating economic value, and that’s important. But buyers don’t always decide on economic grounds. The number they land on depends on which type of value is most alive for them in that moment, and you have more control over that than you might think.

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