Why Amazon Charged $23,698,655.93 for a Genetics Textbook →

As it happened, profnath and bordeebook were both using pricing algorithms to determine the optimum prices for their books. Profnath’s algorithm was designed to have the lowest price possible—but only by a small amount, hence 0.9983—while bordeebook’s was designed to set the highest price—presumably, Eisen writes, because they don’t actually have a copy of the book and would need to buy one elsewhere to deliver it to a customer. Profnath and bordeebook had become locked in an algorithmic death-struggle, that eventually led the book to be priced at $23,698,655.93, shipping not included.

Alas, the sellers seem to have noticed, and profnath dropped the price back down to a rather more reasonable $106.23 earlier in the week, before an idle rich person decided to buy the textbook just because. Interestingly, similar algorithms are used to execute stock trades on a large scale. Not that anything this crazy could happen in the market!