An amusing episode from Michael Eisen: Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies [via James Fallows, Chris Blattman, and many others):
A few weeks ago a postdoc in my lab logged on to Amazon to buy the lab an extra copy of Peter Lawrence’s The Making of a Fly ... The book, published in 1992, is out of print. But Amazon listed 17 copies for sale: 15 used from $35.54, and 2 new from $1,730,045.91 (+$3.99 shipping).
More precisely, the two new books were on offer for $1,730,045.91 and $2,198,177.95. When he checked the next day, Eisen found that the prices had increased further. Intrigued, he kept checking everyday, and found that the two sellers kept hiking the price on a daily basis, until it went all the way up to over 23 million dollars!
As I amusedly watched the price rise every day, I learned that Amazon retailers are increasingly using algorithmic pricing (something Amazon itself does on a large scale), with a number of companies offering pricing algorithms/services to retailers. Both profnath and bordeebook were clearly using automatic pricing – employing algorithms that didn’t have a built-in sanity check on the prices they produced. But the two retailers were clearly employing different strategies.
Fantastic story. Thanks for the link.
ReplyDeleteAmazon can consider waiving the shipping fees for books that cost over a million dollars !
ReplyDeleteJust a treat.
ReplyDeleteOne of the sellers for that book on flies was a "profnath" -- which sounds suspiciously Indian -- and he's no longer in the race on the Amazon page. That's left bordeebook to sell the thing at about $1000 now, still a ridiculous price, if not quite in the $23M league of ridiculosity.
I have a copy or maybe two of the book! Will gladly sell it for $23m and could persuade our library to do so too. The author is mulling over writing a new edition and this may persuade him to wait a bit. Does he get royalties as a fraction of Amazon's selling price?
ReplyDeleteVijay