Amazon Algorithmic Pricing Allegedly Hiked up Price of Reference Book to Millions

April 8, 2023

Amazon's algorithmic pricing came under scrutiny for an alleged manipulation of the high price of a reference book about flies, reaching millions of dollars. The anomaly is suspected to have been caused by two sellers utilizing the paid service that bases product pricing on each other's, as competitors.

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Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

MAP 3.2 — similarity 0.654, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 4.1 — similarity 0.618, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
GOVERN 6.1 — similarity 0.616, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: amazon
Alleged developer: amazon
Alleged harmed parties: amazon

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/528

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

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