This reminds me of a story going around at the chemical department here (probably it is false). Graduate student was told by prof to synthesize a substance. Process is well known, but it is tedious, he would have to spend the next two month in the lab. Since this guy was resourceful he called up privately one of their chemical suppliers and ask if he can order this substance from them. They send him a quote and he ordered it.<p>A few days later his prof comes in, and said: "can you synthesize a bit more, the company we sometimes take assignment from has a customer who also needs it"....
Off topic but it reminds of the book by Jack Stratton called "How I made $290,000 selling books" priced at $290,000.<p>Couldn’t find the original listing.<p>The author is a member of Vulfpeck, pretty fun band.<p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/6ofdt6/how_i_made_290000_selling_books/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/6ofdt6/how_i_made_29...</a>
There was the $1k "I Am Rich" iPhone app that just put up an image of a glowing gem. The price was set by the author as a work of art so it's not directly related to the amazon book prices. 8 people bought it according to the Wikipedia page<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Rich" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Rich</a>
While working on my side project [0], I regularly find some pretty outlandish prices on Amazon. This post makes me want to add further analysis on 3rd party prices and how they relate to one another.<p>[0] <a href="https://unitprice.org" rel="nofollow">https://unitprice.org</a>
I noticed that after I bought some old less known books for < $50, few weeks later they would cost over $1000. I think to myself that now for the amount these books are worth I could buy myself a condo in the Caribbean. Joking of course.
This type of bot pricing is very irritating. Sometimes when I want to buy a book for research I need to wait a lot for it to have a normal price if someone bought it before me.
This happens all the time on Amazon. Just search for a product, like shirt, and then change the sorting from "relevance" to "high to low". For this particular search at this time there is a nice women's $2,000 Nike tee shirt.
It makes sense. There is no much cost for such a mistake. Some team somewhere has a "correct overprice bug" low in the priority of their backlog of tasks.<p>Have you found many books that you wanted priced at $0?
> Why though would bordeebook want to make sure theirs is always more expensive? This would seem to guarantee they would get no sales. But maybe this isn’t right – they have a huge volume of positive feedback – far more than most others. And some buyers might choose to pay a few extra dollars for the level of confidence in the transaction.<p>Alternatively bordeebook may be focused on when the competing book sells out (these are used book listings on Amazon which are single units). Then they will be the only alternative, and at a 27% markup. Books also often get bought in bursts (group sales, class assignment, labs, book clubs), so this might be reasonable purchase pattern prediction.
The steam marketplace also has algorithmic traders (despite being against TOS to automate marketplace interactions). I found myself in a position where there was only one other listing for a limited time discontinued item that I had bought a few of. I bought the other one so I could set the market price (gouging sure but there wasn't any demand so still risky). Another one was listed within 15 minutes. I bought that one too, steam only reveals to you who the seller is after a purchase (and it was the same seller).<p>I wasn't convinced it was a bot and not just someone paying close attention to their steam account until I realized they would under-list me every 5 minutes or so. Since there was no activity on that item, and no buy orders, I experimented by listing my item lower and lower, and they kept undercutting me, down to a floor. Their floor ended up being pretty low (around an 85% loss on what they originally bought at), and after I bought at the floor they then re-listed another for double that, before slowly declining again to under-cut me. For an item with no demand, I decided not to try to slowly buy out their entire inventory at the algo's floor.<p>I found other items that bot was also trading (after I bought them) and discovered that they also change their listing prices based on where people have buy orders set (a good indicator of some demand / market value), so their floor is higher on an item with any demand at all.
I talked once to a dev who does this sort of thing. Its common. It's also interesting to consider what options folks have for quick, easy short-circuit algorithms. Any ideas for clever hacks to prevent the totally absurd with minimal state retention needed?<p>When I started talking about moving averages and trend related metrics, the person I was talking to commented that they where doing this in Excel or an Access database and wouldn't know how to handle that with say 250,000 books they might know or care about... then again maybe the downside of having one random crazy price is not even worth a cheap hack.
Some outlandish prices are for money laundering etc. Not this one maybe. Seller is known cohort of buyer. For the Amazon sales fee, they get to transfer funds and get a great item at the same time.
I wonder could you exploit this if you're the company who has the book.<p>Buy it as a normal user from the other company for $23 million. They buy your copy for $22 million. Wait until the end of the returns window (assuming Amazon enforce one) and return it for $23 million. They try to return it to you, but it's too late.<p>Probably the bookshop notices something is wrong on the $23 million item, but maybe you could make a few thousand this way.
It is a more general problem on Amazon, and in other internet resellers. Products are proposed at insane price, and stay there during month or years, waiting for a dumb buyer. This is annoying, because when you browse Amazon looking for something interesting, you are polluted with all theses dumb offers.
Theres a lot of predatory pricing now with these algos (not in the legal/official sense of the phrase which is to undercut competitors). For instance I noticed that I was being charged 6x compared to others for something that I frequently bought on an app.
I have experienced this myself on a smaller scale.
I was looking for an old book but all the sellers wanted $80 or more.
One day the prices started to fall with two suppliers, always a few cents every few hours.
In the end I got the book for about $10.
This is fairly normal, Edition 5 is going out of stock when Edition 6 is released. Some famous youtuber puts a link to Edition 5 and drives demand/traffic on the item, and boom $50 manual becomes $5,000. Edition 6 is still $50.
I have noticed such pricing tactics with Udemy. I typically buy courses for $10-12 range, but they frequently show me courses around $94-$136 range. (especially when I am logged in my account).
Next time someone asks how markets work (art, housing, stocks etc) ill point them here. The most mind boggling is that no one is to blame. Our system has gone nuts. We can hope someone will lower these prices out of greed but that is optimistically assuming they even have the books. It seems more like each system has a finite life span that we barely understand until we see it expire.