Slightly cheaper elephants?

[Vaughan Pratt <pratt@CS.Stanford.EDU>]

Normally I click the "No thanks, just place my order" button at Amazon when
asked whether I want to "Share the Love".  This feature lets you supply
a list of friends ahead of time whom you can email after your purchase
of a book with the happy news that you've secured them a 10% discount
on that book.  I ignore this feature because it casts you in the role of
Amazon salesperson and turns your friends into your clientele for as long
as they remain on your euphemistically named "Amazon Friends list."  At 10%
I find this role downright embarrassing.

Now if I could get my friends 100% discounts, or maybe even 50%, I'd have
to reconsider this.  I was just about to click the "No thanks" button on
my preorder of Peter's "Sketches of an Elephant" when it occurred to me
that a 10% discount on enough money to buy a house (ok a doll-house) was
the monetary equivalent of a 50% or even 100% discount on a lesser tome.

So this raises two questions.  First, are other sources of "Elephant" at
17% or better off Amazon's $295.00 price available to us eager students
of toposophy?  (See below for why 17%, $245.50 to be precise, and not 10%.)
And if not, is there anyone who'd been contemplating the purchase within
the next week (Amazon's time limit) who'd like to be on my list, even if
just temporarily for the sake of this one book, in order to be able to get
it for the amazingly low price of $245.50?  (Oh, that's the one I would
have chosen, sir, just sign right here, and here, and here.)

OUP presumably does the best off this deal, with Amazon next and me third if
I end up with at least two "friends."  (With only one "friend" the friend
relationship may as well have been symmetric since each side gets 10% off,
but that's still a 10% discount for each of two purchasers of the book.
The only advantage of no "friends" is you get to keep all your real friends,
but then no one gets a 10% discount that way.)

One thing about this system that I find truly evil is that if 2n purchasers
form n pairs in this way so that every purchaser winds up with a 10% discount
on the book in question, this seemingly fairest of all arrangements turns
out to be suboptimal for the purpose of extracting discounts from Amazon.
The optimum is to elect a single salesperson, who buys the book at no
discount, after which every purchase of that book within that week extracts
20% per book, half of which goes to the latest purchaser and the other half
to the elected salesperson.  With enough "friends" the salesperson who
took the original risk makes out like a bandit!

I propose to reverse this as follows.  I'll buy my copy at $295.00.  Anyone
wanting to be my "Amazon friend for a week" can then get it at $265.50.
To spare me the embarrassment of becoming a salesman I'll send you an Amazon
gift certificate for $20 which further gets your price down to $245.50.
I still clear $9.50 (if I haven't lost a decimal point somewhere like those
Anderson guys did), which means that if three people join this cockamamie
scheme (my gamble I guess) then I end up with close to the discount I'd
have gotten with only one friend, but my friends then become real friends
because I'm offering them $49.50 (16.7%) discounts on a book from Amazon.
Or two such if they buy two copies.

So, if anyone who was planning to postpone their doll-house purchase in
favour of buying two copies, or even just one copy, of Peter's book on huge
arches (ele arch, phant huge), please let me know and I'll add your name to
my list.  I will hold off on the actual purchase however until it is clear
that everyone who wants to be in on this in anything like a reasonable time
frame has joined, since the opportunity cost of splitting this arrangement
into multiple weeks is $59.00 per split (proof by induction, with the base
case being one purchaser, who gets no discount, whereas a second purchaser
brings the total discount to $59.00).

If you spot anything I've misinterpreted about Amazon's Share the Love scheme
in the above, *please* let me know soon before this hole is dug too deep.

Vaughan