I’m pretty much only the second. There’s no item I want so bad that I can’t pass it up. I put in the max I’ll pay for an item early, and I’ll go about my week. If I win, great. If don’t, no remorse. If I really want something, I’ll buy on a normal market. I don’t really collect or seek out anything too hard to find, and I don’t want to get emotionally involved in buying shit.
No criticism of this discussion intended; it’s been quite interesting. But I just want to point out that “put in the max I’ll pay” is not at all what’s happening with the specific auction I’m discussing in the OP. The first three bidders just put in the minimum possible bid and did not (AFAICT) put in a maximum. That’s the behavior that I find puzzling. Did the third bidder, for example, think that by raising the bid from $102.50 to $105 they would have a good chance of winning? And when the next bid raised the price to $107.50, they said “oh well, I give up; $105 was actually the most I’m willing to pay; I won’t go up to $110”? I mean, it’s possible, but for three bidders to have hard maximums at $100, $102.50 and $105 seems strange to me.
No you should have been able to buy at the third highest bid + the minimum bid increment. That would have been your price had the top bidder never bid.
It sounds like they might have been ‘probing’ to see if the existing bid was already at its maximum level.
Swithing back to psychology, it smells to me like many bidders attribute their wins to superior tactics, rather than simply being more willing to spend more money than their competitors on that particular auction.
Humans love to see nonexistent patterns in random shit.
If I’m right, you would expect to see all kinds of cockamamie behaviors that are really just individual superstition. If you could interview those bidders they could provide their rstionale. But good bet it would amount to gibberish when analysed scientifically.
ISTM optimal play is trivial. Enter a bid at the current min with a max that is your top price. You will get the item as cheaply as the particular other bidders permit. And if you don’t get it, your max was uncompetitively low. As Richtofen said, “All else is rubbish”.
Assuming of course all honest actors, no shills, etc.
Yeah, there’s a lot of confirmation bias going on!
This is egregiously wrong - because in a sealed bid auction other people’s bids are not available.
Where an item is relatively unique or not sold often or where a market is volatile what other people are bidding - right here right now on this particular item - is clearly market information. You say knowledgeable bidders develop “some kind” of analysis - but its often not very good.
It can be both. My point is that if the problem with an open auction is that if someone “probably would have been willing to pay more” per @ricepad’s post to which I was originally replying, sealed bid auctions have the same potential problem. Potential bidders who may have been prepared to pay more in an open auction where they know they are not beyond the market may not do so if they are uncertain about the market because bids are sealed.
Neither system ensures that the particular bidder who would if necessary be prepared to pay the most does so.
The one time i bid on a possibly unique item that i really really wanted to buy now (my baby daughter’s security blanket has worn out, and i found a new version of the same quilt on eBay), i guessed what it was worth, and bid about three times that much. At the end of the auction, i paid about as much as I’d guessed it was worth.
Optimal play is to snipe, because some people decide what to bid based on your bid.
There are plenty of people out there who are quite prepared to bid one increment more than your bid, but not prepared to bid that much if they don’t see your bid.
Aaah yes. Good point.
Game-theoretic optimal play in the face of a field of other game-theoretic optimal players is one thing. Optimal play in the face of a field of other players each with their own sometimes wacky ideas of optimal play is quite another.
Kinda like “reading the room” is open outcry, you have to consider how your actions will be received and possibly counteracted. Sniping avoids all that, except that of your fellow snipers. Depending on how sophisticated and fast their sniping tools are vs. your own.
Egregious?? Really now!
Other bidders’ bids are not usable market data in a sealed bid scenario, because when a bidder makes a bid, no other bidders’ bids are known. I’ll agree that in an open auction, bids are market data, but in a sealed bid sale, bid amounts are only data to be analyzed after the fact.
Exactly. This is how I bid. If near the end the bids are approaching my max, and I really want whatever it is, I might raise my max. But that’s about it.
If it’s something I’m not desparate to have, and I think I can get it for a decent price, I’ll just place a bid and forget about it. Sometimes I win; sometimes I lose. No biggie.
The auction finished, with a significant amount of sniping, as I’ve usually experienced with eBay auctions. The bid increased from $155 to $233 in the last minute of the auction, with about 10 bidders involved in that final flurry.
Remember- MANY ebay items get only one bid, if that.
I recently bid on a jigsaw puzzle. It’s a hand cut puzzle by a guy who was probably the best puzzle cutter in the US until he retired. And it’s too hard. He said it took him more than 6 hours to assemble the 300 pieces, and I’ve done puzzles with him, he’s a very fast puzzle solver .
Anyway, i thought about it, and decided that if i could buy it cheaply, I’d like it, and if it goes for a lot of money, I’m not interested in competing. So i bid $150. (That’s very little for a hand cut puzzle. They usually sell for at least a dollar a piece, and he would have charged more for this one when it was new.)
I’ll know in a week if anyone else wants it. I’m happy with my bidding strategy. (Bid when i first notice the auction, and then ignore it until the auction is over.)
Lord knows I’ve used eBay dozens if not over a hundred times. But there are definitely days I wished it behaved like a real auction. The time an “auction” ends is still set the same way. But at that point bidding is allowed to continue and not stop if a counterbid shows up within 30 seconds of the latest bid. If such a bid is made then the clock resets 30 seconds. Gavel down is when no bids have been made in the last 30 seconds.
I don’t see why this isn’t doable, or preferred. I hate sniping bids. It is not natural to the auction process.
Page reloads and server speeds back in the day weren’t up to dynamic bidding. The hard deadline is now what all but those few people familiar with traditional auctions are used to. Also, Ebay would just as soon ditch the whole bidding thing in favor of fixed pricing which is what they have been trying to steer their sellers toward the last twenty years.
Any mechanism that resulted in real time bidding after a deadline would be inconvenient to people not in the same time zone as the seller. Even just within the USA we have 6 hours time difference between Hawaii & the east coast.
There would also immediately be automated sniping-like systems to game that 30-second clock. And endless protests about “I clicked on time, but your stupid server didn’t recognize my input so the item went to somebody else.”
That kind of bid structure only benefits the sellers, so good for them, but as someone who mostly only buys stuff that would turn me away from the service. I have no idea why a buyer would want that.
The last time I bid on an eBay auction was something like 15 years ago, for a cassette tape of a hard-to-find movie soundtrack that Mrs. J. wanted (I sniped and won).
What I’ve gotten on eBay since then has entirely been on a buy-it-now basis, which covers anything I want. It might be a different story if I was a collector of objets.