Fake it until you make it. It's natural conclusion of Doing Things That Don't Scale: http://paulgraham.com/ds.html

First 100 people through the door get 15% off!

Beta testers get the full game half price!

And of course, authors do this on the NYT Best Seller list all the time... buy enough copies of your own book at enough book stores and you'll shoot right to the top: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times_Best_Seller...

Because Apple and Google are presumably trying to inform people searching for apps by providing them with useful information. If that information is gamed, then it's not useful. And since Apple and Google are the ones setting the terms of use, I think gberger's question is extremely valid and don't know why anyone would down-vote it (not claiming that you, koolba, did). Moreover, I'd hope that a response to it wouldn't have been dismissive and, ideally, would cite some reason to believe it.

New York Times would definitely care if they had reason to believe a book on their Best Sellers list was having its sales inflated. In fact, they mark those books specifically with a dagger next to them and the practice of price manipulation is a subject of on-going controversy which is presumably costing the list some prestige. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times_Best_Seller...