Erroneous
12-15-2008, 09:26 PM
http://www.swoopo.com/
An auction site ingeniously constructed to profit from people's idiocy. You pay $0.75 per auction token, which you use to bid on a product starting at the low, low price of $0.15. Each bid increases the price by $0.15 and the duration of the auction by 15 seconds. The winning bidder pays the price he bid when no one else is willing to continue bidding.
So say an LCD monitor is put to auction for $500. Many people are willing to bid initially for the change to get an awesome deal. At some point the bidding will reach a decent price and the bidding will slow, but people motivated by the sunk cost fallacy feel invested in the auction and continue bidding. Even if the item is sold for a heavy discount the auction site earns all of the money for the auction tokens spent that did not result in a winning bid.
An auction site ingeniously constructed to profit from people's idiocy. You pay $0.75 per auction token, which you use to bid on a product starting at the low, low price of $0.15. Each bid increases the price by $0.15 and the duration of the auction by 15 seconds. The winning bidder pays the price he bid when no one else is willing to continue bidding.
So say an LCD monitor is put to auction for $500. Many people are willing to bid initially for the change to get an awesome deal. At some point the bidding will reach a decent price and the bidding will slow, but people motivated by the sunk cost fallacy feel invested in the auction and continue bidding. Even if the item is sold for a heavy discount the auction site earns all of the money for the auction tokens spent that did not result in a winning bid.