This is one thing I find fascinating about iterative price negotiation: if one party can get a given price to "stick", they can use that normalization as a de f

This is one thing I find fascinating about iterative price negotiation: if one party can get a given price to "stick", they can use that normalization as a de facto negotiation tool. And given that there's no collective bargaining on the side of app developers, Apple holds all the leverage, even against giants like Netflix and Google [0]. Once a one-sided pricing norm is established ("industry standard"), whichever party established the norm is highly incentivized to never budge, even to their own detriment on some transactions, lest the norm erode [1]. This phenomenon isn't limited to app stores: I think we see it play out in other economic domains (mortgages/landlords/wages), as well as the political (any policy concessions, even mild or reasonable ones, signals weakness and creates a perceptual opening for your opponents to twist the knife). I suspect there is a formal economics label for this phenomenon which is escaping me at the moment; if anyone more learned on the subject would care to enlighten me I would appreciate it. :) [0] It does seem telling that Amazon seems to be the only giant in the position to carve out a secretly negotiated exception, no doubt because they're so often in the same game themselves: taking hardline stances on negotiating with suppliers, effectively "winning capitalism" within their niche. [1] I harp on the concept a lot, but one way of modeling such norms is as Schelling focal points: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_point_(game_theory) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_point_(game_theory)