Marginal Revolution: Amazon purchase circles

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Amazon purchase circles

Find out what people are buying in a particular area or institution, click here. Here is the list of bestsellers for George Mason University. Is it better or worse than the list for Fairfax, Virginia? Here is the Marine Corps list. Here is the federal judiciary. Here is the list for The New York Times. Dow Jones Co. is less intellectual. Here are other media listings.

Browse geography. Try MIT. Compare it to Brown University. For self-referentialist reading, try Oracle Corporation.

Thanks to Pablo Halkyard for the pointer. Comments are open, in case you know more about this.

Posted by Tyler Cowen on November 1, 2005 at 09:21 AM in Books | Permalink

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Comments

The next time I hear a complaint our right-wing extremist judiciary, I'll have to remember to point out that Bushwhacked and an Al Franken book are among the top ten best selling books on that federal judiciary list.

Posted by: Xavier at Nov 1, 2005 10:44:08 AM

Xavier, I knew someone was going to point that out. Honestly, it surprised me too.

Note: Buying Al Franken's book does not mean the institution is left-wing. For instance, the undeniably Republican-controlled US House of Representatives list also has Franken's book.

All it means is that there are more people buying it than you'd expect. This could be accounted for by a general institutional liberalism, or by a small group of dedicated liberals, or even that it's on someone group's reading list this month, and O'Reilley will be on the list next month.

Posted by: Andrew Edwards at Nov 1, 2005 11:15:19 AM

Fascinating! Thanks for the link.

Posted by: Maureen Box at Nov 1, 2005 11:59:25 AM

The Oracle list is very interesting. As anyone who's dealth with Oracle support probably knows, they often have less understand of how their products work than their users. Plus, their documentation sucks.

Posted by: Noah Yetter at Nov 1, 2005 1:15:40 PM

I cannot understand the top seller among the federal judiciary: The Two-Income Trap - Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke. Federal judges are rather well-paid and unlikely to be facing the same financial problems as the true middle class. They're also realtively unlikely to have to move to expensive communities in order to find good school systems for their children, as most of them are at the ages in which their children are out of school.

Posted by: Peter at Nov 1, 2005 1:32:38 PM

Against intuition, General Electric people seem enthused by books on growth and doing business better whereas GE Capital are more interested in the like of 'The Life of Pi' and Harry Potter. I guess the boys with the fat checks are just more chilled out.

Posted by: Fluffy Economist at Nov 1, 2005 3:27:04 PM

It is important to understand that Amazon creates these lists by extracting purchases that are more popular with each specific group than with the general population. Said differently, the items at the top of the bestseller list for each group are not the items most frequently purchased by that group, but instead the items purchased by that group that are most unusal when compared to other customers of Amazon. Almost like a ranking based on "comparative advantage" rather than "absolute advantage" for you international trade types, or based on diffs-in-diffs for you applied micro types.

Posted by: Commenterlein at Nov 1, 2005 7:36:53 PM

And what's their sample size? How many people use amazon to buy stuff during their work hours or at their workplace?

While large sample size is probably true for university campuses (in particular the dorms), Amazon'd better publish the stats.

Posted by: Reasoner at Nov 1, 2005 11:38:13 PM

Shouldn't there be a blog entry somewhere about buying the Episode 3 DVD and locking yourself in the office for the afternoon?

Posted by: Matthew Cromer at Nov 2, 2005 4:01:02 AM

How do they tell what institution someone is affiliated with? Email address? (I order stuff using an email address that is not affiliated with my employer, and I expect most people do as well.) IP address that the order is placed from?

As to the comment above about left-wing books on the federal judiciary's list, remember that judges are only a small fraction of the people who work for the federal judiciary, and the politicial affiliation of those low on the totem pole does not necessarily reflect that of the higher-ups.

Posted by: Brock at Nov 2, 2005 8:58:09 AM

The belief that "order is true" and disorder is false or somehow wrong, is the Aneristic Illusion. To say the same of disorder, is the ERISTIC ILLUSION

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