Ebay Assignment - AWOL

The Basic Assignment

1. Find an item (as cheap as this one or as expensive as this one) that you'd like to buy that you have the money to pay for.

2. The item should be an auction item rather than the "Buy It Now" type. Check to make sure you will be able to pay for it - don't bid on "PayPal Only" items unless you have legal and ethical access to a credit card. Most items also allow "Money Orders" which you can get at the post office in trade for cash. Don't bid on something you don't want or can't afford. You may also have to create an Ebay account if you don't already have one.

3. Consider your strategy. Decide to make an early big bid, an early low bid, or a late or very late big or low bid, or repeated bids. Consider JBidWatcher.

4. Take notes on your feelings and actions while you wait for the auction to end.

5. Write a 1-2 paragraph description of your experience and a 1-2 paragraph analysis that connects your experience of capitalism, through this assignment, to the AWOL. Please post this to your blog as a separate item by December 19, 9pm.

Some more stuff about the assignment:
Ebay is a great example of how capitalism has permeated the American Way of Life. Everything in the world seems to be for sale and regular people are doing most of the buying and selling.

For our purposes of gaining insight into the forces shaping our lives we can analyze the strategies used by buyers and sellers and the mindset, habits, and effects on our lives that are engendered by participation in this particular free market. Since Ebay is a particularly free market that is hugely popular in the US we can gain a sense of how capitalism, in a relatively pure form, affects us.

I urge you to actually bid on and win an item on Ebay so you have the full effect of participation. I also hope that many of you will bid and lose so you get that experience as well. Of course I am unable to monitor your actions through Ebay and have little desire to be an omniscient tracker of your online activities. So if you track items ("watch this item") and record bids and starting and ending prices, etc., then you will be able to successfully approximate (fake) the assignment. This activity is yet another "real world simulation" like the auction we did this past Friday.

Be warned that some people get addicted to Ebay and that in general looking at a computer screen (even if it saves you money and gets you cool stuff) is not a really adequate substitute for living.