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Zachary_Kurtz comments on Money pumping: the axiomatic approach - Less Wrong
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_red_paperclip
A fish-shaped pen for such a doorknob? (For that matter, who would want a red paperclip instead of a perfectly good pen?)
From Boy Scouts, I remember that camp stoves were expensive. Even the smallest cheapest ones, for backpackers, are no less than 60$ new: http://www.coleman.com/coleman/ColemanCom/subcategory.asp?CategoryID=2005 And from the picture, he traded for one of the big ones.
A snowmobile for some beer & a neon sign? IIRC, snowmobiles, even used ones, cost hundreds & thousands of dollars; whereas a keg of beer is <$100 and a Budweiser neon sign probably not much more.
A cube van. I looked in the Blue Book; that was probably worth well upwards of 2000 dollars.
The comments on the blog estimate the year's rent at 5 or 7k. The recording contract was 30 hours in the studio & 50 hours of post-production. I suspect someone was ripped off here but I can't tell whom.
The movie is a straight-to-DVD film I've never heard of, and which still hasn't come out. The role is described as credited & speaking, but who knows how much one actually gets. I'd say the town was the loser in that deal, unless they value the publicity that highly.
So yeah, I'd say on multiple deals the traders were financially exploited, and this says more about their willingness to participate in a well-advertised stunt than it does about whether the deals were actually fair.
But what do you mean by "fair trade" here. It's not like any party didn't know what the deal was. This just means there's something else at play which was determining the value of the goods to both participants. What is "unfair" about this type of exchange?
Well, if you're going to assume that any deal which seems unfair to a mere outsider will have 'something else at play' rendering the deal actually fair, then there's nothing I can say about that. Such assertions are like that of the Austrians - no mere evidence can falsify it. (After all, who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? Er, I mean, differing preferences.)
Well the Austrians are right in that the traditional assumptions of rationality (and therefore fairness) don't make much sense.
Although I think the behavioral economists are doing a decent job of backing up these type of assertions: the point that "fairness" is subjective.
Can someone engage in a trade they don't believe is fair? Yes of course.
But if both parties say a trade is fair, who is an outside observer (with all the market data in the world) to tell them otherwise?
"Fairness is not agreement, fairness is symmetry."