{"id":7532,"date":"2020-07-01T18:36:19","date_gmt":"2020-07-01T18:36:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/theoreti.ca\/?p=7532"},"modified":"2020-07-01T18:36:19","modified_gmt":"2020-07-01T18:36:19","slug":"the-bad-things-that-happen-when-algorithms-run-online-shops","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/?p=7532","title":{"rendered":"The bad things that happen when algorithms run online shops"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.bbc.com\/future\/article\/20150820-the-bad-things-that-happen-when-algorithms-run-online-shops\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full\" src=\"http:\/\/theoreti.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/07\/p0305z5y.jpg\" alt=\"\"><\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Smart software controls the prices and products you see when you shop online \u2013 and sometimes it can go spectacularly wrong, discovers Chris Baraniuk.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The BBC has a stroy about&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.bbc.com\/future\/article\/20150820-the-bad-things-that-happen-when-algorithms-run-online-shops\">The bad things that happen when algorithms run online shops<\/a>. The story describes how e-commerce systems designed to set prices dynamically (in comparison with someone else&#8217;s price, for example) can go wrong and end up charging customers much more than they will pay or charging them virtually nothing so the store loses money.<\/p>\n<p>The story links to an instructive blog entry by Michael Eisen about how two algorithms pushed up the price on a book into the millions, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.michaeleisen.org\/blog\/?p=358\">Amazon\u2019s $23,698,655.93 book about flies<\/a>. The blog entry is a perfect little story about about the problems you get when you have algorithms responding iteratively to each other without any sanity checks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Smart software controls the prices and products you see when you shop online \u2013 and sometimes it can go spectacularly wrong, discovers Chris Baraniuk. The BBC has a stroy about&nbsp;The bad things that happen when algorithms run online shops. The story describes how e-commerce systems designed to set prices dynamically (in comparison with someone else&#8217;s &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/?p=7532\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">The bad things that happen when algorithms run online shops<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[74,54,58,11,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7532","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-artificial-intelligence","category-big-data","category-ethics-of-data-science","category-internet-culture-and-technology","category-programming"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7532","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7532"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7532\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7535,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7532\/revisions\/7535"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7532"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7532"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7532"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}