Your Personality & Lifestyle as a Tradable Asset

An Australian guy is selling his current life on eBay:

This auction is for a New Life in the coastal town of Wollongong, Australia of a 24 year old male. It includes the following:

Winning bidder will take ownership of my:
-Name
- Phone number
- All my possessions
- I will teach you my skills
- Will introduce to all my friends & potential lovers (around 8 which I have been flirting with)
- I have around 15 close friends and around 170 other friends
- I have 2 nemeses.
- Lifestyle is very social. It includes a lot of going out.

NB: Friends will treat you exactly as they have treated me. This includes friends who take me surfing, running, climbing and cook for me. All of these features will be transferred over to the winning applicant.

Life also includes the following features
- Will have access to a cruisy job in march delivering fruit.
- You will write a satirical horiscope in the University of Wollongong Magazine.
- You will have new parents to have Christmas with & birthday presents from friends.
- A birthday party will also be organised for you.

This auction also includes the following
- A 4 week training course by the former me which includes the following:
- Many anecdotes and stories from a very interesting and intriguing past 24 years of my life
- 6 Jokes
- Training in becoming me (fashion, food, lifestyle, style of seduction, interests)
- Haircut like mine
- Piercings to the value of $180.
- Lessons in my personal history (The good stuff and the bad stuff)

NB: After the 4 week training winning bidder will also receive 2 months of on-call support.

There are a few more interesting details at the site. He seems to be doing this to film a documentary about it. The current bid is over $60,000 Australian dollars (about $47,000).

Another example of a creative way of finding something of value that you can sell as an asset.

(Source: Marginal Revolution)

Economics of Trying New Things

A post at Free Exchange discusses a small purchase he made that brought him a lot of joy. The key part of his post is this:

While I was at AEA, I had lunch with Dick Thaler, the famous behavioural economist from the University of Chicago. He lauded my (much derided) penchant for experimental purchases of small items at supermarkets and drugstores, pointing out that at my age, the net present value of future utility from a "find" is huge, while the costs (pecuniary and utilitarian) are negligible.

The idea is that young people should try a lot of new things because if they find something you like, you have much of your life left to enjoy it. Even if you try 10 new foods and only like 1 of them, you have given up relatively little and gained a lot of future enjoyment.

What do you think about this idea? Is it a good reason to try new things? Or is there a better reason to stay with what you like? What else could this apply to other than trying new foods?

An personal addendum to this rule that I used when travelling in Japan is that I am willing to try any food, provided I am not told what it is or what is in it until after I have tried it. It helps me keep an open mind.

(Source: Free Exchange)