You may recall that I ran an experiment last month where I put my time up for auction.

The auction was won by Zack M. Davis. He bid £550 and paid £501 for help working with some maths self-study on Causal Inference. We’re working through understanding a textbook he’s studying, and did one three hour session over Google hangouts and will do another one later this week.

I think we were both a little sceptical that the format would work well (even without the fact that I don’t know much about causal inference), but if so we were both wrong. There were some difficulties – communicating about maths without a shared blackboard (or, if you insist, whiteboard) is hard, but fortunately we had the textbook in front of us for reference and could fall back to typing if necessary, which worked more than well enough. At the end I think we both understood the material a lot better than at the beginning, and Zack seemed very happy with the result (and I enjoyed it too!).

So all told I’m calling that a success: I’m happy and Zack is happy. I got an amount of money for my time that I’m perfectly happy with (it’s a lot less than I’d do for my high priced consulting, but a pretty good day rate for general purpose dev contracting), and Zack got help that he found useful at a price he was happy to pay. A good time was had by all.

Some statistics for the interested:

• There were a total of 15 bids.
• The second and first prices were quite a lot higher than the others.  The third price bid was £200.
• The lowest bid was £15
• The median (and modal) bid was £100.
• Not terribly surprisingly, almost every bid came from someone in a personal capacity rather than a company. The exceptions were people who were basically freelancers who have their own company for their work and Beeminder, probably partly because Danny heard “Vickrey auction” and came running.

In general, I’m very pleased with this experiment, and will be repeating it by running another auction next month (I’m skipping this month both because of the delay and because everything is a bit busy right now).