Last spring, a young biologist tried to buy a copy of a common but out-of-print reference work, Peter Lawrence’s The Making of a Fly. Amazon offered 15 used copies at reasonable prices – and two new copies, the cheapest of which was $1,730,045.91, plus $3.99 shipping.
Michael Eisen, an evolutionary biologist at UC Berkeley, heard the tale and tried to figure out what was going on. It can’t have been a prank – there were two sellers involved, both with thousands of satisfied customers. Eisen heard that many prices on Amazon were set by computers, and suspected this might be the reason.
