I paid $0.02

A few days back I talked about the new Radiohead album and the band's innovative "pay-what-you-want" pricing scheme. I also went ahead and asked people what they would shell out for the new tracks. While my sample was very small (thank you Maheer and James), I believe it is fairly representative: most people on various other blogs also commented that they would pay well above the $0.02 minimum for In Rainbows.

After a great deal of thought, I went ahead and officially purchased the new album today. I decided to pay the minimum price, which actually worked out to about $1.00 thanks to credit-card related transaction costs (45 pence). Why did I pay so little? My reasons were the following:

1) I am a poor student
2) I will probably end up spending $100+ for concert tickets and another $15+ for the official disc version of In Rainbows (which will feature an additional 8 tracks, including the sensational "Bangers 'N Mash")
3) If they are allowing me to spend next to nothing, why not? I can collect on all that extra consumer surplus.

What's even more interesting was how guilty I felt right after the transaction was processed. Here were my post-purchase thoughts in the order that they happened:

1) Man, I am a really bad Radiohead fan.
2) Other people will think I am a bad Radiohead fan when they find out how much I paid for this album.
3) I feel like I'm stealing: I would have paid so much more in the store. Another way of saying this: I paid far, far less than my personal valuation of the good.

I'm willing to bet that a lot of people would go through this reaction, conditional on what they paid for the album. After all, I think it is for the above reasons that people were willing to pay more than the required minimum in the first place, why we overtip waiters and waitresses, why we donate $15 instead of $5 for entry into a large public museum, etc. In this case, from the standpoint of a standard economic model, there is no rational reason to pay more, so the psychology behind this behavior must be quite rich. This is a long way of saying that aspects like signalling to other consumers (2) and guilt (3) play a large role in these decisions.

Any thoughts?