Inside the Amazon juggernaut: bots, algorithms, flash-crashes
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Wall Street Journal "The High-Speed Trading Behind Your Amazon Purchase" March 26, 2017 [^]
Quote:
The vendor of the marshmallows I wanted told me his high price was an attempt to bait competitors into raising their own asking prices for the item. This works because sellers of commodity items on Amazon are constantly monitoring and updating their prices, sometimes hundreds of thousands of times a day across thousands of items, says Mr. Kaziukėnas. Most use “rules-based” pricing systems, which simply seek to match competitors’ prices or beat them by some small fraction. If those systems get into bidding wars, items offered by only a few sellers can suffer sudden price collapses—“flash crashes.”
Note: I was able to access the full text of the story (from S,E Asia, no VPN) without a subscription to WSJ ... once. To access the full-text again, I had to clear the Chrome cache (I use CCleaner).
«When I consider my brief span of life, swallowed up in an eternity before and after, the little space I fill, and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant, and which know me not, I am frightened, and am astonished at being here rather than there; for there is no reason why here rather than there, now rather than then.» Blaise Pascal
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Wall Street Journal "The High-Speed Trading Behind Your Amazon Purchase" March 26, 2017 [^]
Quote:
The vendor of the marshmallows I wanted told me his high price was an attempt to bait competitors into raising their own asking prices for the item. This works because sellers of commodity items on Amazon are constantly monitoring and updating their prices, sometimes hundreds of thousands of times a day across thousands of items, says Mr. Kaziukėnas. Most use “rules-based” pricing systems, which simply seek to match competitors’ prices or beat them by some small fraction. If those systems get into bidding wars, items offered by only a few sellers can suffer sudden price collapses—“flash crashes.”
Note: I was able to access the full text of the story (from S,E Asia, no VPN) without a subscription to WSJ ... once. To access the full-text again, I had to clear the Chrome cache (I use CCleaner).
«When I consider my brief span of life, swallowed up in an eternity before and after, the little space I fill, and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant, and which know me not, I am frightened, and am astonished at being here rather than there; for there is no reason why here rather than there, now rather than then.» Blaise Pascal
Hi Bill, the article can be accessed freely at Morningstar[^]. /ravi
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