The celebratory tone of the Freakanomics post is also pretty inexplicable. Why is he so happy that one student out of eight bid $0.05, when the model that he's teaching supposedly predicts that everyone bid $17.50? Either his model is horribly wrong, or the students haven't learned anything, or both...

Maybe this professor just doesn't spend much effort on his blog posts. Take a look at http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/21/why-my-students-dont-get-rebates where he uses the phrase "Pareto improvement" in a completely wrong way. Anyone who doesn't already know what it means will be misled, and those who do will be confused.