22. December 2008 by emeris.

At crookedtimber there is much anger over Amazon’s pricing system. Looking to verify this I found that while amazon is being evil, it’s not in the way expected. Instead of setting prices per person, they are playing games with shipping costs so that all of their vendors end up costing the same.

Responding to the directions for checking in the original blog post:

I noticed on the top of the page a line that said “This item is not eligible for Amazon Prime when purchased from DigitalEtc. See more buying choices” where the last four words are a link that goes to a page of vendors for this card. At the top there is your $17 card from the only vendor that is eligible for Prime, where as the $10 one is marked as ‘item low price’. That page also notes that the $10.45 card isn’t eligible for either the Prime or Supersaver shipping, and will always cost you $6.68 in shipping.

This is amazon playing games with multiple vendors, not playing games with pricing per person. More interestingly, on the ‘featured vendor’ list all 4 of them are listed as ‘price’ in large letters, and ’shipping’ in small letters, and all 4 are exactly $17.13 when totaled.

I have attached a screen shot

Posted in computer, Econ | 3 Comments »

19. March 2008 by emeris.

This is pretty cool.

Nice when markets work the way they are supposed to due to some technology . The penny summery, fisherman in India got mobile phones, their waste dropped to zero, their average profit went up, and the consumer price went down. This is postulated, as I understood it, to be because they now had the ability to call multiple beach front markets and determine where their fish would sell best before having to land, thus the distribution of fish became more efficient.

Posted in Econ, politics | 1 Comment »