Gabor Granger

This guide covers everything you need to know to run a Gabor Granger pricing study in OpinionX: what the method tells you, how to set it up, what your survey participants experience, and how to read every result.

Whether you've run 100 Gabor Granger surveys before or this if your first time using this method, this guide covers what you'll need to know. At OpinionX, we remove unnecessary jargon from advanced market research methods, so other than the unusual name 'Gabor Granger', you'll find everything in this guide clearly explained with clear examples wherever relevant.

If you're just looking to learn about Gabor Granger surveys in general, check out our blog post guide to Gabor Granger for pricing research, which is more of a beginners' guide to the method itself rather than being specifically about how it works on our survey platform OpinionX.

Gabor Granger helps you answer one question: what's the most people will pay for this?

Instead of asking people to name a price (which they're bad at, since they'll strategically lowball or pluck a round number out of thin air), Gabor Granger shows each participant a specific price and asks a simple yes/no: would you buy at this price? Based on their answer, it shows another price in the direction they indicated they were interested in, and then the same again once they vote yes/no each time.

From those yes/no answers to specific prices, Gabor Granger builds a picture of exactly how much of your market is willing to pay at every potential price point.

It's a great fit when you already have a rough sense of your pricing range and want to find the specific number inside that range that maximizes revenue. It works for one-time purchases and subscriptions alike, and it's especially useful for finding the "sweet spot" price where the balance between how many people buy and how much each pays produces the most total revenue.

In OpinionX, Gabor Granger is a built-in question type. You add it like any other question, customize a few settings, and OpinionX handles everything else: the voting experience for respondents, the branching logic that decides which price to show next, analyzing the results, and creating the charts for you; all handled automatically.

Every Gabor Granger block asks respondents the same core question, once per price:

Would you purchase [product] at the following price:

You can edit the wording to fit your product, and translate it into any language you want (OpinionX has an auto-translate feature on multi-language mode that can do this for you).

Where methods like Van Westendorp ask four different price questions and conjoint analysis asks about trade-offs, Gabor Granger keeps it simple with one consistent question shown across a range of different prices, and asking participants to vote 'yes' or 'no' for each price point they are shown.

When people vote yes/no on a price, the survey platform needs to decide which price to show next. Most survey tools use inefficient methods, such as sequential ordering (go up one price after 'yes' or down one price after 'no'), or randomized ordering (jump to a random price within the remaining range).

Both of those methods are very inefficient; a participant might answer 15+ questions just to identify their willingness to pay.

OpinionX uses a smart selection method called binary search instead. After each yes/no vote, OpinionX jump to the midpoint of the remaining possible prices, cutting the search space in half every time. That means:

The math is logarithmic, which allows you to test way more prices without burning through your respondents' patience. This makes OpinionX the most efficient Gabor Granger tool available on the internet, helping you get more precise pricing data with fewer questions per participant.

The first price a person sees in a Gabor Granger survey acts as an anchor that colors every answer after it, so if everyone starts at the same price, anchoring bias is baked uniformly into your results with no way to detect or correct it.

OpinionX uses a different approach, where the first price each participant is asked to vote yes/no on is drawn randomly from the middle third of your price range. By spreading the starting price across a range of values, anchoring noise averages out across your sample instead of shifting your whole demand curve in one direction.

This 'middle third' setting is always on and there's no toggle to disable it, because it makes your data meaningfully more reliable at zero cost to the participant experience.

Gabor Granger on OpinionX has two optional add-ons, both of which are enabled by default but can be easily toggled off from the survey setup menu (jump ahead to section 5 for more on this).

Before showing anyone a price, we ask a simple opt-in question to gauge whether someone is a target customer for you or not:

Would you purchase our product if it were available at a reasonable price? → Yes/No

Anyone who says no skips the remainder of the Gabor Granger section entirely, proceeds to the next stage of the survey, and gets classified as Not Interested on your Gabor Granger results. This keeps never-buyers from polluting your demand curve with noise answers, as a "no" from someone who wasn't going to buy at any price is very different from a "no" from someone weighing whether the price is right.

On the survey setup page, you can customize the wording on the presceener question to make it as broad or narrow as you want, or turn the prescreener off entirely if your survey audience is already pre-qualified.

If a participant says yes to every single price in your Gabor Granger survey, they are usually marked as having "no ceiling". In these cases, you don't know their true willingness to pay, you just know it's at least as high as the most expensive price you included.

This approach from most other survey platforms isn't really an optimal situation -- a Gabor Granger survey with a high proportion of "no ceiling" voters may indicate that you set the price range too narrowly, and knowing their stated maximum would at least help you to adjust the range shown during voting.

That's why Gabor Granger surveys on OpinionX have an optional 'Above-Max Question'. When enabled, it asks an open question at the end of the Gabor Granger section asking participants who voted 'yes' to every price point:

What's the maximum price you would realistically pay for this product?

The answers that participants submit on this Above-Max Question don't influence your Gabor Granger results and are never plotted on the results chart. Instead, they are marked as 'no ceiling' and their above-max answer is recorded on the Participants Tab for you to see how high they say they would go.

As shown above, the toggles for both of these optional questions can be found on the Survey Setup tab when editing your Gabor Granger block.

Each price is shown as a card with the question text above and a big 'Yes / No' pair of voting buttons below.

Three things happen automatically to keep the experience smooth for respondents:

The whole experience typically takes 15-45 seconds per participant, including the prescreener. Even if your survey is testing hundreds of price points in one Gabor Granger block, the entire voting experience takes seconds, not minutes. It's one of the fastest research methods on OpinionX and it's fully mobile-optimized.

Here's a step by step guide covering the entire process for setting up a Gabor Granger survey on OpinionX…

Create an OpinionX survey and choose 'Gabor Granger' as the question type, which you'll find under the 'Advanced' list of formats.

OpinionX survey questions are fully customizable, so you can add any other question types to your survey too, including multiple Gabor Granger sections in a single survey, or mixing multiple advanced methods like conjoint and maxdiff together in your Gabor Granger survey.

Customize the Gabor Granger block to your context, such as:

Clarity here matters, vague or missing context is the most common cause of noisy pricing data. Preview how your Gabor Granger survey looks to participants before you launch your research!

The range of prices in a Gabor Granger survey are often called a 'price ladder', as each vote sends someone climbing higher or descending lower. To control the price ladder, your OpinionX survey has four fields:

Minimum Price and Number of Prices are both constants set by you. The final two fields are variables; setting Price Interval will cause your Maximum Price to update, and changing your Maximum Price will cause the Price Interval to change.

There are also two settings for controlling the formatting prices are shown in:

Both price prefix and suffix are optional, as in some countries currency symbols appear as a suffix instead. Prices are always shown with a full stop as the decimal point.

Below these setup fields, you will see the full list of price points that will appear during voting. Within this list of prices, the potential starting prices are shown in bold (remember, the starting price will be picked randomly for each participant from the middle third of your price range).

On your survey dashboard, click the 'Preview' button in the top-right corner to walk through the respondent experience yourself before sharing. Within the preview experience, you'll also find a menu for customizing the colors/style of your survey to suit your brand or personal preference.

On your Survey Setup dashboard, click 'Add another question' to include other research methods or survey questions in your study. Each question is a moveable block that can be dragged or moved to any position in the survey. Configure branching logic if you only want certain participants to see and answer your Gabor Granger study.

Every change you make is automatically saved and backed up, so there's no 'publish' option; once you're ready to launch, hit the big 'Share' button in the top right corner and choose your survey distribution method (eg. a simple 'Copy Link' or more advanced options like Email Invites or Unique Links).

Every Gabor Granger survey produces one main chart on the results dashboard.

It shows two lines:

This 'average revenue' line is typically a bump-shaped curve. The top of the bump shows you the key insight from a Gabor Granger survey -- the 'Optimal Price' which produces the most revenue overall.

Gabor Granger is often described as a 'price elasticity' research method. This paragraph explains what that means and how to interpret it from this chart. This is a technical explanation that is useful but not essential in understanding the results of your Gabor Granger survey, so feel free to skip past this.

Every pricing decision is a tug-of-war between two forces: charging more per customer and keeping more customers. At low prices, increasing the asking price tends to win that fight, because you gain more overall revenue from the higher price than you lose from the few people who drop off. Eventually though you reach an inflection point where this logic flips, and each additional increase in price now loses you more customers than the extra revenue from the higher asking price makes up for, so average revenue falls. The top of the curve, marked on OpinionX with a star, is where the two forces balance and that's called your revenue-maximizing price. Finding the revenue-maximizing price point is the primary goal of a Gabor Granger survey.

Because the metric is averaged across everyone in the target market rather than just buyers, it's directly comparable from one price to the next: a $10 price and a $40 price are measured on the same per-head basis, which is what lets the peak actually mean something.

You'll sometimes hear the area to the left of the peak called the 'inelastic zone', where raising your price gains more revenue than it loses in dropped customers, while the area to the right where the 'average revenue' chart slopes downwards is called the 'elastic zone' where raising your price loses more revenue in dropped customers than the higher price makes up for.

Above the chart, you'll see four boxes that summarize your results:

One of the biggest advantages of running research on OpinionX's survey platform is that every question type is compatible with our segmentation analysis engine! There are a bunch of ways you can use our segmentation analysis features on your Gabor Granger results:

Here's an example of Gabor Granger crosstab results viewed on the Segments Tab:

In this screenshot, you can see a 'crosstab' table on OpinionX's Segments Tab. In this table, there are three columns for each of the 'gender' options that were give: female, male, and other. Each column shows the results for the Gabor Granger survey when only participants from that group are included.

We can see some big differences between these three groups — for example, males have a slightly higher willingness to pay, while people who answered 'other' had a considerably lower optimal price than average. This is a great example of why segmenting your Gabor Granger reveals the most valuable insights from a pricing study.

Treat Gabor Granger charts and results as a guide to finding the right price, not a revenue forecast. Because stated intent overstates real purchasing behavior, the price results are estimates, not predictions of your actual monthly revenue.

For example, the Optimal Price chart can be better considered as being great at:

For Gabor Granger surveys generally, a few habits meaningfully improve your data:

How many prices should I test? The default is 10 prices, which resolves in up to 4 questions per participant. If you have a wide range of possible prices ($5 to $500), test more prices by setting the number of prices to something like 60-100. If you have a narrow range and know it well (eg. $20-$30 in $1 steps), then having just 11 price points is fine. There is no hard rule or limit here, you should instead match the survey setup to your research context. The binary search logic means the participant question count barely changes regardless of how many potential price points can appear in your survey -- 15 prices resolves in 5 questions, 100 resolves in 8. So don't be afraid to increase the number of prices, it will ultimately result in better data compared to wide gaps in price points.

What's a good sample size for Gabor Granger? 100+ for directional insights, 300+ for confident Optimal Price identification, 500+ if you plan to segment your results. Segmentation splits your sample into smaller groups, so more segments means more data needed.

Can I use this for subscriptions rather than just one-time purchases? Yes, use the price suffix (eg. per month or /month) for recurring pricing, or leave it off for one-off products. You can even test it with other pricing metrics like $x per seat or €x per 100 AI credits by customizing the price suffix field during survey setup. Gabor Granger is a very flexible and versatile survey method, it works the same either way, so get creative :)

Is the revenue chart a forecast of what I'll earn? No, treat it as a tool for finding the right price and seeing how flat or sharp the revenue peak is, not as a prediction of actual revenue per customer. Remember the research principle that stated intent runs ahead of real-world purchasing!

What happens if a participant hits the maximum price? If they say 'yes' to your highest price, we don't know their true willingness to pay, just that it's at least that high. If the above-max question is enabled, they'll get a follow-up asking for the maximum price they'd realistically pay. If it's disabled, they'll simply be flagged as No Ceiling on your results and they'll move onto the next section in your survey.

Should I disable the interest prescreener? Disable it if your audience is already pre-qualified (eg. you're surveying existing customers of a related product). Keep it on if you're surveying a broad audience where some participants aren't in the market at all, otherwise their 'no' answers to your low prices will muddy your demand curve. The purpose of this prescreener is to get a more accurate demand curve.

Can I change the order of the prices shown or which price gets shown first? No, and for a good reason! OpinionX uses middle-third randomization for picking the starting price and binary search to pick the next price after each answer, which are both more efficient than the sequential ordering or random ordering approach used by every other survey tool. This means participants answer fewer questions to give you the same amount of pricing information.

Need a hand with your Gabor Granger survey? Reach out via the in-app live chat, book a survey setup call, or use your prepaid consulting credits if you're on a premium plan to call in an expert researcher to work alongside you.