Perry E. Metzger writes: > have been significant academic studies of the market, and they > indicate that your portrayal isn't accurate.
I was incautious; "smart" spammers go back at least to Canter and Siegel. What I should have written was "spammers are greedy, but many aren't too smart." I don't do such studies myself, but my colleagues do a lot of those studies for various markets. What those studies invariably show is that (1) the most profitable businesses generally are reasonably smart -- getting to the top may have been a matter of luck but staying there takes work and some smarts, and (2) there is usually a large fringe of "noise traders", agents who are doing pretty random things. Some of the latter can get big enough to be noticed before their bubbles burst. > I would presume that if you don't understand what they're doing, it > isn't because it is completely irrational, but rather because you > don't get exactly what they're attempting. That's possible. Nevertheless I suspect that there are quite a few out there who are doing things that make sense only to themselves and will disappear in unprofitability (although some may be deliberately random, as in "fuzzer"-style software testing). Either way, though, some spammer behavior is inexplicable and it's probably not worth trying too hard to figure it out. Steve ------------------------------------------------------ Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org
