Of book sales and robots

One of my hobbies is reading books: another is buying and selling them. Online retailers such as Amazon are one of the places I often use when looking for a book or trying to sell one.

Generally the price of books online is related to supply and demand, but you do get the odd instance when prices don't appear to make sense. Sometimes you get ludicrously high prices asked - at other times the price has dropped to 1p plus postage for a book which is large and heavy enough that the sellers can't expect to receive more money in total than the book will cost to send.

A major part of the reason for this is when sellers have used a computer to set their prices. In an interesting blogpost over Easter, "Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies," Michaek Eisen discussed how this can produce all manner of perverse results.

As readers observed in the comments thread, strange results in stock markets and currency markets can result from the action of similar computer programmes.

Moral of the story: when other people entrust their decisons on what to buy and sell to computers, this presents you with both opportunities and risks!

Comments

Jim said…
one that always amaazes me is Aution Fever. This is where people get carried away with placing aution bids. Its one reason why on E-bay you will often see the current bid is higher than the "buy it now" price.

another reason for this is the seller either creates 2 acounts and bids higher, or has a friend bid higher, to ensure that he gets at least the asking price for each item. If the freind wins, its the seller who effectivly buys from himself, thus the e-bay commission is worth the extra items he sells at full asking price

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