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   Dan Luu (danluu@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 17-Nov-2023 03:33:27 JST Dan Luu

   in reply to

   of course he makes even worse errors in real markets, which are much harder to price.

   I've seen this myself every time I've gone car shopping as well, e.g., when the time-before-last I bought a car, I saw a bunch of cars that dealers had overpriced cars, put in reasonably priced offers for them, which were all rejected. Many months later, I looked up all of those cars. They hadn't sold and were listed for less than I offered due to depreciation, so the dealerships lost a ton of money on those.

   • Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: likes this.
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     Dan Luu (danluu@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 17-Nov-2023 03:33:28 JST Dan Luu

     in reply to

     I don't find it odd that stuff is listed well below market value. At the individual level, a lot of people selling stuff just don't care about the money. And then for companies where this is their bread and butter, like car dealerships, well, I know a guy who runs two dealerships (https://mastodon.social/@danluu/110841855982720659) and have played board games with him where you can price stuff perfectly because you can compute the exact value of items. He makes bad errors in this simpler environment with perfect info, so

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     Dan Luu (danluu@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 17-Nov-2023 03:33:29 JST Dan Luu

     in reply to

     There are some markets where people do this, so the opportunity is small, e.g., there seem to be ~5 people who do this with office furniture locally, so you have to be very fast to get a deal, but few classes of goods have enough people doing it to eliminate amazing deals, e.g., a friend of mine does this with cars and is basically permanently renting a car that makes him money.

     Based on the profit and the number of opportunities, he could make a living doing this, but he just does it for fun.

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     Dan Luu (danluu@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 17-Nov-2023 03:33:31 JST Dan Luu

     I find it odd how easy it is to make money buying and selling consumer goods, up to and including cars. You used to be able to do this on craigslist and you can now do it on FB.

     I'm not excited to do this for the money, so I only do it when there's something I or a friend wants to "rent" and it happens to be offered for free or negative cost. I know a few other people who do the same and they easily make 2-5 times minimum wage per hour.

     Why doesn't "the market" make this opportunity go away?