Flooding the market

Flooding the market is an excess amount of inventory for sale causing an undesired drop in price for the product that can, in extreme cases, make the products impossible to sell at any price.

Businesses take measures to avoid that effect. For example, publishers will release books from popular authors under pseudonyms, as with the Kenyatta series by Donald Goines, which were published under the name Al. C. Clarke. The same also occurred for Stephen King, who published several books under the pseudonym Richard Bachman.

The video game crash of 1983 was largely caused by excess inventory of low-quality games. Atari, Inc. greatly overproduced the game E.T. and could not sell them, and disposed of the inventory in a landfill.

Flooding the market can be done intentionally in an effort to eliminate competition and is then known as dumping.