Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies

A few weeks ago a postdoc in my lab log on to Amazon to buy the lab an extra copy of Peter Lawrence ’s The Making of a Fly – a classic employment in developmental biological science that we – and most other Drosophila developmental life scientist – confer with on a regular basis . The book , published in 1992 , is out of print . But Amazon listed 17 copy for sales event : 15 used from $ 35.54 , and 2 new from $ 1,730,045.91 ( + $ 3.99 merchant vessels ) .

I sent a screen seizure to the generator – who was fittingly amused and intrigued . But I doubt even he would reason the book is worth THAT much .

At first I reckon it was a gag – a grad bookman with too much time on their manpower . But there were TWO newfangled copy for sale , each being offered for well over a million dollars . And the two sellers seemed not only legit , but fairly big clock time ( over 8,000 and 125,000 rating in the last year severally ) . The prices looked random – indicate they were jell by a information processing system . But how did they get so out of whack ?

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Amazingly , when I reload the Sir Frederick Handley Page the next day , both priced had gone UP ! Each was now nearly $ 2.8 million . And whereas previously the prices were $ 400,000 apart , they were now within $ 5,000 of each other . Now I was intrigued , and I jump to follow the page incessantly . By the close of the day the higher priced copy had gone up again . This time to $ 3,536,675.57 . And now a figure was emerging .

On the daylight we disclose the million dollar prices , the copy offered bybordeebookwas 1.270589 times the price of the copy offer byprofnath . And now the bordeebook copy was 1.270589 times profnath again . So clearly at least one of the sellers was coiffure their monetary value algorithmically in response to changes in the other ’s price . I preserve to catch cautiously and the full shape emerged .

Once a day profnath set their monetary value to be 0.9983 times bordeebook ’s Mary Leontyne Price . The prices would remain close for several 60 minutes , until bordeebook “ noticed ” profnath ’s change and lift their price to 1.270589 times profnath ’s higher price . The pattern continued perfectly for the next week .

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But two questions remained . Why were they doing this , and how long would it go on before they detect ? As I amusedly watched the cost advance every day , I learned that Amazon retailer are progressively using algorithmic pricing ( something Amazon itself does on a large shell ) , with a number of companies offer pricing algorithms / armed service to retailers . Both profnath and bordeebook were clearly using automatic pricing – use algorithms that did n’t have a establish - in saneness check on the prices they produce . But the two retailers were clear employing dissimilar strategies .

The behavior of profnath is easy to deconstruct . They presumably have a new copy of the book , and desire to make indisputable theirs is the lowest price – but only by a lilliputian bit ( $ 9.98 compared to $ 10.00 ) . Why though would bordeebook want to make certain theirs is always more expensive ? Since the price of all the trafficker are brand , this would seem to warrant they would get no sales . But maybe this is n’t ripe – they have a vast volume of irrefutable feedback – far more than most others . And some buyers might choose to pay a few extra dollars for the level of authority in the transaction this might impart . Nonetheless this seems like a fairly risky matter to rely on – most people probably do n’t acquit that way – and meanwhile you ’ve find a al-Qur’an sitting on the shelf collecting dust . Unless , of row , you do n’t in reality have the Holy Scripture … .

My preferred explanation for bordeebook ’s pricing is that they do not actually have the Word . Rather , they mark that someone else list a copy for sales event , and so they put it up as well – relying on their better feedback record to draw buyer . But , of course , if someone actually orders the al-Qur’an , they have to get it – so they have to set up their price significantly high – say 1.27059 clock time gamy – than the price they ’d have to pay off to get the book elsewhere .

Bark Watch

What ’s fascinating about all this is the seemingly endless possibilities for both chaos and devilry . It seems unimaginable that we falter onto the only example of this kind of up pricing spiral – all it read were two Peter Sellers adapt their cost in response to each other by agent whose product were greater than 1 . And while it might have been more difficult to deconstruct , one can easily see how even more outre thing could happen when more than two Peter Sellers are in the secret plan . And as soon as it was clear what was going on here , I and the people I talked to about this could n’t avail but start thinking about way to work our power to predict how others would price their books down to the fifth significant dactyl – especially when they were clearly not paying careful aid to what their algorithm were doing .

But , alas , somebody at long last noticed . The damage peaked on April 18th , but on April 19th profnath ’s price fell to $ 106.23 , and bordeebook soon followed suit to the predictable $ 106.23 * 1.27059 = $ 134.97 . But Peter Lawrence can now comfortably gas that one of the biggest and most well-thought-of company on Earth valued his great book at $ 23,698,655.93 ( plus $ 3.99 merchant vessels ) .

Michael Eisen is an evolutionary biologist at UC Berkeley and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute . His inquiry centre on the phylogeny and universe genomics of gene regulation in flies . This billet was republishedfrom his web log .

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