If you haven't read it already, Michael Eisen's post on two Amazon bots driving up the price of an out-of-print book is worth a read. A teaser:
As I amusedly watched the price rise every day, I learned that Amazon retailers are increasingly using algorithmic pricing (something Amazon itself does on a large scale), with a number of companies offering pricing algorithms/services to retailers. Both profnath and bordeebook were clearly using automatic pricing – employing algorithms that didn’t have a built-in sanity check on the prices they produced. But the two retailers were clearly employing different strategies.
M.A.Orthofer at The Literary Saloon adds:
This is sort of amusing (especially since no one was obligated to buy at these prices) — until you start wondering about what else is getting priced in this way. Recall the 6 May 2010 'flash crash'
The Dish 