Woot's Bag o' Crap

for those who don't know, Woot.com sells one item at a time. Every day, at midnight, a new item is sold

Once in a while, they will sell an item called a Bag of Crap. This is an item that costs at most 3 dollars (+5 shipping). What's in it? Well, crap.

Woot will send you various things - maybe an ipod holder (or 10), a multi tool, stickers, trash bags, pens, flashlights - crap.

Or, they can send you things like a roomba, a dvd player, an hdtv, wii, etc.

Now, you don't know what you're getting when you buy. But, when these go on sale, they are out of stock within the first 5 minutes (assuming the server isn't crushed by the sudden influx of people). Why are these so popular?

Well, you can win stuff that can be worth anywehre in the range of (what i've observed to be) 20-4000 dollars. Woot takes advantage of the fact that you dont' really know how many items are on sale to raise your expected value - which they expect you to predict to be above 8.

Even if it's not, it's still pretty exciting to maybe be able to win some stuff. Oops - is this a budding gambler in the making?

for those interested to see what people get, here's a link :http://www.bagsofcrap.com/boc_items/

The bag of crap is also a great example of an information cascade at work. As an avid user of Woot I often see on the community boards new users talking about how stupid this idea may seem. But after a day or two these same people are begging for their chance at a BOC since, like in the urn game, they see all of the positive comments about the legendary BOC and disregard their own personal information of the fact that most of the time it is just a wast of 8$, just as the third person picking a ball out of the urn will disregard their information if they observe a different result than the first two people.

The bag o' crap is an amazing deal by far. I'll explain it in terms of a game we played in class during the first week or so: There is a cost of $3 to play. You recieve a random item of value that could randomly range between $1 and $1000. While it is not a uniform distribution, the average value of an item you get is far greater than $1. Obviously, the game is incredibly in your favor, statistically. Because this is so, you're only allowed to play 3 times (3 items is the cap on any purchase on woot!). I've never been able to get my hands on a bag, since they sell out insanely fast.

If you EVER have a chance to buy a bag o' crap from woot!, TAKE IT.