If you were shopping for a new copy of Peter Lawrence’s book "The Making of a Fly" — a classic work on developmental biology — on Amazon in 2011, you might have gotten quite a shock. The book was priced at $23,698,655.93 (plus $3.99 shipping)! What happened? Michael Eisen, an evolutionary biologist at UC Berkeley, first noticed the strangely high book price. Initially he saw new copies of the book going for about $1.7 million, but each time he checked Amazon's site, the price seemed to crawl a bit higher. At first he thought it was a joke, but there were two new copies for sale, each offered for well over a million dollars. The two sellers seemed not only legitimate, but fairly big time. How did the pricing get so out of whack? Eisen began to keep track of the prices until he caught on to what was happening: The two sellers of that particular book — bordeebook and profnath — were adjusting their product prices algorithmically based on competitors. The biologist continued to watch the prices grow higher and higher until they hit a peak price of $23,698,655.93 on April 19. On that day profnath’s price dropped to $106.23, and bordeebook soon followed suit to the predictable $106.23. That meant someone must have noticed what was happening and manually adjusted the prices. It seems that no safety measures were put in place to prevent similar pricing phenomena from happening again though, because later that year there was a single new copy of "The Making of the Fly" available on Amazon for $976.98. Today the book is available on Amazon at a reasonable $21.33.
