HP 12c supplemental literature?

[Allen]

(04-27-2020 01:19 PM)rprosperi Wrote:  Did you see the price for the Amazon listing?!?!

I did!! There are some irrational prices. Items stored in Amazon Warehouses accumulate storage fees, but items that are FBM "Fufilled by Merchant" do not. As such, it is not unreasonable (from the seller's vantage) to price a commodity well above Fair Market value. If it sells, they make money, but they loose nothing if it does not sell. A seller who has little or no marginal cost (storage, fees, photographs, employee wages) could in theory have everything in their house listed for 200% of the competitive Open Market Value (MV or OMV). If something sells, they could go buy another one at OMV, having paid nothing upfront.

Zillow, the popular real estate site, used to have a "Make Me Move" style listing that offered a similar supply/demand logic. Sellers who were not actively looking to move, but would be willing to consider it for a premium could telegraph their level of interest by posting a "for sale" price (usually well above local market price).

In contrast to the stock/real estate markets whose characteristics of centralized markets, published sales history, and large trade volume all nicely converge to support microeconomic principles of Marginal Utility, Supply and Demand, and Rational Pricing, niche markets (out of print books, excellently made HP calculators, vintage trains, etc..) are often traded in fractured online markets, with very limited sales history (price or volume) available to either buyer or seller. Paradoxically, once collectable items are isolated in collections they become economically inert and there are no market trades to establish a current Open Market Value.

There are sites that aggregate sales prices for certain online marketplaces, but for niche markets, the volume is very low, and for rare items, doubly so. At best, an interested party might check minimum price tracker like Camel Camel, or TOS's sales history which ages off every 90 days or so. One lacks volume data and price distribution, the other lacks longevity.

I can see two potential upsides to irrational overpricing, which is enough for me to understand why it happens:

First, I have long suspected that potential sellers actually discard rare/expensive HP items that are hard to price because they don't know the market value of the $300 item. If an easily discoverable "Make Me Move" amazon listing has the item listed at $600, I believe a potential seller is more likely to invest the time needed to offer their item for sale, and usually will do so below the inflated $600 price. This creates healthy competition between the sellers, and if/when one or more of the sellers is motivated (by the need for money or market friction like relisting fees or storage costs, or the sudden appearance of competition), the price will eventually float down closer to "Open Market Value" of $300. If the overpriced listing did not exist, the second buyer might have concluded that there was no viable market for the item and discarded it. Case in point, yesterday I recycled a book after seeing one on TOS go unsold for under $10.

Secondly, if a seller is unable to estimate the OMV of a "rare" item due to lack of sales history ($6, $60, $600, $6000, ...), barring any market friction, it's in the seller's best interest to price it above OMV and have it unsold for some time rather than price below OMV (sometimes by an order of magnitude) and have it scooped up immediately. In absence of sales history, irrational overpricing can help establish an upper limit to the Open Market Value without having to execute a trade. (by overpriced items going unsold).

So auctions with $0 or low initial starting prices are useful to establish a lower bound for Market Value from the bottom up, and unsold buy-now offerings above Market Value can help establish upper bounds. The closer those two bounds are, the better we can understand the market value of rare items - without having to actually witness a trade.