Online auction "game" exploits cognitive blindspots to make you overspend

Here’s a fascinating analysis of the mechanics of Swoop, an online auction game (they call it “entertainment shopping”) (!) that’s designed to be a Skinner box for separating you from your money while confounding your judgement:

First I will lay out for you how the site works. It is a ‘auction’ site…sort of. Swoopo sells bids for $1. Each time you use a bid on an item the price is increased by $0.15 for that item. So here is an example:

Person A buys 5 bids from Swoopo for $5 total. Person A sees an auction for $1000 and places the first bid. The auction is now at $0.15. Person A now has a sunk cost of $1 (the cost of the bid they used). There is no way to get that dollar back, win or lose. If Person A wins they must pay the $0.15.

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All Entrepreneur Types from A-Z

Shuttling between tech meetups, VC meetings and conferences, I realized that there are so many types of entrepreneurs that it would be a mistake to group them all under one general umbrella. So I tried to correct that horrible wrong with this list of all entrepreneur types from A-Z.

enterpreneur
Classic example of a fantrepreneur photo courtesy of Phil Hawksworth

ALL ENTREPRENEURS FROM A - Z

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