More Amazon shenanigans

I thought that Amazon Marketplace just made space available for sellers, but it seems the mechanism also contains a bit of what in computing is known as “intelligence”, i e there’s a programming interface and depending on the intelligence and foresight of the programmer things may happen for good and bad. Michael Eisen relates how the price of a book balloons to several million dollars when the scripts of two competing sellers attempt to optimise their pricing in order to appeal to different market segments and maximise profit. The comments even suggest that there might not be two separate sellers, but a single seller attempting to cover the market all alone. Perhaps nothing is what it seems.