Paying Readers: The Results

The experiment is over, and I have paid five of my readers for reading this blog; my total outlay came to $5.12. The average (mean) bid was $380,952,457.64. The lowest bid was one Zimbabwean cent; the highest was $8 billion. The highest winning bid (the fifth-lowest bid) was $4.44.

I sent $0.41 to Riz Din, which is worth 20p. I sent $0.01 to Maio Liu. I didn't send one Zimbabwean cent to William Marshall, since PayPal doesn't do Zimbabwean cents, and the lowest amount I can send over PayPal would be many orders of magnitude greater than that. I sent $0.25 to Daniel Naylor. And I sent $4.44 to Nick Lawler, who can pat himself on the back for successfully sending the fifth-lowest bid.

I could have stopped there, since I paid out to the five lowest bids including the bid of (essentially) $0, but I felt I should make five actual payments. So I also paid $0.01 to Joel David Parsons, who bid $5 but had an automatic rebid at 1 cent if his bid failed (which I thought was a bit sneaky, so I kind of ignored the rebid in the first go-round).

In the end, then, I made five payments, totalling $5.12, of which Nick Lawler received the lion's share: 86.7%. I'm quite glad I didn't need to choose between the three different $5 bids. Here's the full list, in chronological order:

$5 "on the chance you won't get many replies"
$0.01 "if I am one of the five guys win,then I can get at least one cent,and if I'm not,that means I must bid 0 cent to win,well,don't bother then"
One Zimbabwean cent
20p "equivalent to just over 40 cents"
$540.17 "for me to place a competitive bid, I'd be hoping to win at most a few dollars (or perhaps pennies), an amount over which I'm not excited about troubling you to pay me."
$79.97 "I predict you end up paying no more than $1.00 to all five combined"
$37.91
$20
$5 "If that bid fails, I would like to automatically rebid at 1 cent."
$10 "that will buy me lunch and is the minimum amount necessary to get me excited about winning"
$540.18 "Alternately, $50.00 donated to Oxfam America"
$30 "a sushi dinner for my wife and I"
$43.94 "Why that amount? Two weeks of venti lattes at the Starbucks downstairs from my office."
$5 "though the nash equilibrium is 1 cent"
$250
$15
$16.79
$4.44
$6.40
$8 billion "There's a slight chance that gmail routes all your emails, except this one, into spam, after all."
$0.25 "I can use that quarter to buy Robert Kiyosaki a clue."