My inner economist was intrigued and a little confused after learning earlier this month that Radiohead would let individual fans decide how much to pay to download the band's latest album.

Mind you, Radiohead didn't conduct this experiment auction-style or take an average of the combined offers to set a new price point for their offering. You could pay $1,000, in a seemingly altruistic gesture, or anonymously opt for the 92 cent handling fee.

Though I am a fan of the band, I haven't yet downloaded the album and I'm still not sure how much I'd be willing to pay.

Should I rely on a complicated formula that factors out the costs of physical materials, shipping and sales? Or base my price on the number of songs? Or the length of the album? Or how good I expect it to be?

Or shoot, since they were dumb enough to offer it for free?

Actually, it's interesting to read what some Seattle-area fans are willing to pay. Seems $10 feels about right, for most. You're paying less than you would at the store, but still not ripping off the band.

But as with any deal that seems too good to be true, buyers who downloaded the album have found reason to complain.

Many tech-conscious fans were irked to learn after they paid that the album was encoded at 160 kilobytes per second, lower quality than Radiohead's other downloadable albums and certainly less clear than the sound from a compact disc. There's also bonus material that's apparently only available on the yet-to-be released CD.

So, what was the point of this exercise? And what should we learn from it? Was the band trying to usher in a new wave of music consumption, as some would like to believe, or was it, in the end, merely a publicity stunt?

My vote goes to the latter. It's the only theory that makes sense to the economist in me.