The Robb Report

With apologies to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Edgar Allen Poe, and the OMSI.

Who rides so late through night and wind?
It is the student, tired and thinned.
She brings a key tucked in her arm,
For she was told it works a charm—

To breach a door that’s down below,
Where only mold and spiders grow.
The door! Is it true, is it really there,
A portal to a secret lair?

Deep under Wood Hall’s classroom maze,
Icy darkness met her gaze.
She forged on forward ‘though in doubt,
Would Providence help her get out?

At last—plain view—she swiftly saw, The open door, a gaping maw. What can that mean, who’s gone before? The resident, a thing of yore? She darted through—can’t turn back now, She would unmask the sacred cow: Rumors would soon be deflated, She’d learn how grades are calculated. Down a hall and ‘round a bend, She had not time to apprehend, The spectacle of which she saw, A random towering thing of awe.

‘Twas tall and strange the apparatus,
Curious spheres inside a lattice.
Clink and clank, they tumbled well,
And formed a curve in the shape of a bell.

The grading machine did distract
Her from the creature’s sneak attack—
Oh the basement shook, the rodents fled,
Their fight provoked a mighty dread,

She fathomed then, ‘neath the queer glow,
This was a mistake, ab initio.
And as she fell, the last she saw,
Three A-pluses in Con Law!

Copyright 2008, Robb Shecter, All rights reserved.

Does a buyer have an ethical duty to inform a seller of a mistake which causes the product to be vastly underpriced?

The backstory

So here I am in law school, and I’m thinking that my tired-out backpack is not cutting it any more. I’d really like to have something a little more respectable. And so I quickly find myself submerged in the world of super-expensive (to me, at least) briefcases and laptop bags. I.e., $250 and up.

I tried as hard as I could to find one made locally, but could not.  So I check Ebay, and see that a lot of the bags can be had for 30% or so off, via the auctions. But wait! There’s one seller who’s offering a new $300 briefcase for $75 as a “Buy it Now” purchase.

Digging into the facts

How is this possible? Why would she sell a bag for such a low price when she could get much more for it? This seller has a nearly perfect rating, and many sales. I rule out fraud on her part.

I look into her selling history and see that she has posted this particular briefcase repeatedly in the recent past without success. Over the period of a month, she had been re-listing the item and gradually lowering the price down to the $75 at which I found it.

And then I see her problem: She had been listing this Coach briefcase as a Coach’s briefcase. I quickly tested Ebay’s search feature and saw that her ad does not appear if a potential buyer simply searches for Coach. I surmised that by mis-listing the item, she had greatly reduced the number of potential buyers, forcing her to lower the price.

I bought the briefcase.

Wondering about the ethics

I had some concerns even before I bought the item. If this low was price due was due to a mistake on her part—would it be right of me to “take advantage” of that?

And now that I’ve purchased the item; wouldn’t the right thing to do be to let her know about the problem with her listings?

Or, maybe not? This is a “market”, after all. Isn’t it exactly these kinds of inefficiencies and differing skills of participants that, in fact, makes the market function, and is how people make a profit? I’m convinced I could buy these briefcases from from her and simply re-list them on Ebay for twice the price and sell them instantly.

I thought of one thing that mitigates my sense of wrongdoing. This is all theory on my part; I think I know why her prices are low. I think I could re-sell them at twice what I paid. But I could be very wrong.

Today I see that she’s put up another briefcase for sale. Same type as the one I bought, mis-listed in the same way, but this time black instead of brown, and at a very low price. I think to myself, “now that would be nice to have!”

Out in the real world, where sometimes things do go wrong, is it ethical for practitioners to require patients to waive their legal rights, when nearly all practitioners in the area do so?

Randy Cohen, in The Ethicist, says “It is not.” A related issue is, what criteria can doctors use to choose their patients? He sums up by writing, “The right to our day in court should be among the inviolable.” The article is good food for thought:

New York Times Magazine / The Ethicist: Doctor, Bully