ABSTRACT
Adam Cohen’s enthusiastic history of eBay, The Perfect Store, provides two intertwined stories of eBay’s genesis—the “official” story and the “real” story. The official story, as recounted by Cohen, is that Pierre Omidyar
believed in market capitalism, but he was troubled by the gap between theory and practice. Financial markets were supposed to be free and open, but everywhere he looked he saw well-connected insiders profiting from information and access that were denied to ordinary people. It occurred to him that the internet could solve this problem by creating something that had never existed outside of the realm of economics textbooks: the perfect market…. [T]he playing field would be level. Buyers would all have the same information about the products and prices, and sellers would all have the same opportunity to market their wares. The auction format would, as classic economic theory taught, yield the perfect price, because items would sell at the exact point where supply met demand. 1
