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Incident 528: Amazon Algorithmic Pricing Allegedly Hiked up Price of Reference Book to Millions

Description: Amazon's pricing algorithm was implicated in a reference book about flies' unusual high price of millions of dollars, allegedly due to two sellers using the paid service which based their product's pricing on one another's as competitors.

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Alleged: Amazon developed and deployed an AI system, which harmed Amazon.

Incident Stats

Incident ID
528
Report Count
2
Incident Date
2023-04-08
Editors
Khoa Lam
Applied Taxonomies
MIT

MIT Taxonomy Classifications

Machine-Classified
Taxonomy Details

Risk Subdomain

A further 23 subdomains create an accessible and understandable classification of hazards and harms associated with AI
 

7.3. Lack of capability or robustness

Risk Domain

The Domain Taxonomy of AI Risks classifies risks into seven AI risk domains: (1) Discrimination & toxicity, (2) Privacy & security, (3) Misinformation, (4) Malicious actors & misuse, (5) Human-computer interaction, (6) Socioeconomic & environmental harms, and (7) AI system safety, failures & limitations.
 
  1. AI system safety, failures, and limitations

Entity

Which, if any, entity is presented as the main cause of the risk
 

AI

Timing

The stage in the AI lifecycle at which the risk is presented as occurring
 

Post-deployment

Intent

Whether the risk is presented as occurring as an expected or unexpected outcome from pursuing a goal
 

Unintentional

Incident Reports

Reports Timeline

+1
Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies
Incident Occurrence
Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies

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

michaeleisen.org

How A Book About Flies Came To Be Priced $24 Million On Amazon

How A Book About Flies Came To Be Priced $24 Million On Amazon

wired.com

Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies
michaeleisen.org · 2011

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 – a classic work in developmental biology that we – and most other Drosophila developmental biologists – consult re…

How A Book About Flies Came To Be Priced $24 Million On Amazon
wired.com · 2011

Two booksellers using Amazon's algorithmic pricing to ensure they were generating marginally more revenue than their main competitor ended up pushing the price of a book on evolutionary biology – Peter Lawrence's The Making of a Fly – to $2…

Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.

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