Appraisal upgrade experiment #1:
I'm now showing the collected "price paid" entered by shmax users on each product page. Still not using the data to fill in the appraisal numbers, but I thought we could start with this and sort of keep an eye on it to see how reliable the data looks.
http://www.shmax.com/product_details/2415/prowlWhy bother? Well, the theory is that these numbers may be a bit more exact, in that we don't have to wonder if the data points are matched correctly. We know that each data point is correct, because the user explicitly chose the toy that he knows he owns, where as with the auctions there's always the chance that an auction was incorrectly matched (it still happens on occasion, particularly for really generically named toys, like g1 Optimus Prime). On the other hand, we have to trust that there aren't butthole pranksters deliberately trying to pollute the data with silly numbers (ie. $999999999999). There are statistical methods for reducing the impact of outliers, but I thought we'd just start with the raw data.
Tomorrow night I'll make a new price history chart so we can get a better view of the data.
