Quote:
Originally Posted by jspatz1
In my mind the solution to making this process both fair and orderly seems obvious. There is only one aspect missing, and the solution does not require drafts or algorithms or ranking or limits. It is the same system used by the entire commercial and retail world every day, and it works very well: Pricing. Pricing which matches value.
Who can understand the logic of all items having roughly the same price regardless of their real value? A flat ribbon cable has the same price as a laptop computer? Huh? Obviously insane. A yet this is how FIRST Choice was set up. This situation simply invites teams to overwhelm the system in a panic rush to hoard high-value items. Why would you not gobble up all the high-value items when it costs you no more? It should be expected. There is no law of supply and demand because there is nothing to make you consider how much to spend on each item.
|
I definitely agree here, and with the idea someone else presented of informing FIRST of the demand before the items are released for sale. Interestingly enough, I just saw a youtube video on price gouging that was very similar to this same topic. By inflating prices, you can ensure that a product is more evenly distributed to teams and prevent hoarding and mad rushes.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWTsq7F25kg
On the topic of FIRST's small staff: I know that ideas discussed in these forums are at least seen by some FIRST staff, but has FIRST ever considered formally crowdsourcing this type of problem? I have absolutely no idea of the feasibility or how this would work, but it seems that with a given problem, the CD community could present several valid ideas and FIRST could pick one or a few that they liked, give feedback, and teams or groups on the forum could work together to more fully design and implement these solutions. Maybe this would be incredibly hard to do, but if it worked, it could be very interesting.