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.
Entities
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Incident ID
528
Report Count
2
Incident Date
2023-04-08
Editors
Khoa Lam
Incident Reports
Reports Timeline
michaeleisen.org · 2011
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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…
wired.com · 2011
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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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