I won on Swoopo.com, and it was completely random.

I spent a week exploring Swoopo.com and I thought I’d share the experience. For the game theory and strategy geek in me Swoopo has been a fun round of “what-if” and few experiments to test my theories. For the business model geek in me, Swoopo is staggering; It is a legal ponzi scheme! For the human behavior geek it is fascinating and depressing to watch people playing something that is so clearly a ponzi scheme, and playing it poorly. For the programming geek it was a depressing week as the bots that infest the site are pathetically bad; I watched one out bit the retail value of an item by almost 50% and at the end the site proclaimed the 0% savings, apparently not programmed to think anyone would go negative on an auction. A conspiracy theorist might think the bot was run by Swoopo itself and I’m just underestimating how evil they are.

The punch line is that I won an auction and saved a bunch of money so I should be happy right? Well, after much investigation I think it was a random accident, one of the many failures of Swoopo’s technical implementation, not any strategic approach I used. Under certain situations, like an auction ending, the performance of the site becomes highly erratic. Bids will register tens of seconds late, or not at all. Their own bid reporting will fail to report all bids and get swamped. I saw one auction where the winner was reported as having zero bids. Suffice to say that this sort of behavior is Bad (TM) to begin with, but in a site where you have to pay to bid it is unacceptable.

I tried to share this feedback with Swoopo, but their support email address bounces! Perhaps I’ll never see that won item…

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