5 hours left on this auction (I'd give you the link, but then you'd bid against me!) and I am sweating bullets. Why? Because eBay is a jackass. Or eBay are jackasses. Look, eBay behaves jackasserly. With great jackasseritude. How? They end the auction at a fixed time.
I get what they're trying to do: create the atmosphere of exciting bidding by letting people know when to come watch the end of the auction.
The problem? They haven't attracted people, they've attracted computers. People set up auto-bidders that wait until a fraction of a second before the auction ends and then bid it up. This destroys the "thrill of the bid"
So, honest question, why does eBay let this happen? Here's my proposal: if a bid comes in with less than two minutes left in the auction, the auction gets extended for two minutes. Bam, no worrying if you'll get beat without the chance to respond.
This would take off the pressure to bid "in secret" and have to wait until the end.
So... what's the deal, eBay?
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4 comments:
This extended time proposal is part of the mechanic behind Swoopo and BigDeal (temporarily forget about the fact that both of those sites are gray-market lotteries for a sec).
If your max price set is truly your max price, then sniping shouldn't be a problem right? The only reason why the item eventually sells for .$25 over your max price is because someone didn't bid up beyond your max price. Their max price could have been $20 beyond the final selling price. So, if your really honest with yourself about what the MAXIMUM you would possibly pay for the item is, then you shouldn't have an issue I think.
I agree with Andrew on this. The botton line is, you have to have the highest bid to win, regardless of when it is placed (except when 2 bids are the same or there isn't enough difference between them to meet ebay's minimum bid increment, in this case, the 1st bid in wins).
The "thrill of the bid" is appealing for many, but looking for it isn't the most efficient thing to do.
Why not snipe yourself? It's the best strategy when bidding on ebay auctions.
Your analyses miss at least 4 points:
1) It assumes that there is no information gained *during the bidding*. If I'm bidding on something I've never seen come up for auction before (as was the case here; a video game of which only 5000 were made 30 years ago), then I don't have a good feel for the market. During bidding, I'm getting useful information about it, which would obviously feed back into the mental algorithm I used to price my bid to begin with.
1a) Also, the pace of bidding in a real auction feeds you information. To prove this, consider poker. Why do we say our bets out loud at the poker table instead of writing them down simultaneously, then opening them, and taking the highest? Because the process of betting(/bidding) contributes to the result per se.
2) This assumes I trust the system to not take my bid and raise it. This could happen at the eBay level (unlikely...), or at the merchant level: he could have his friend raise his bid until I'm outbid, then claim that guy was a deadbeat, and sell it to me for my max bid.
3) As convenient as it is to think there's some price, under which I'd be happy to get it and over which I'd be happy to leave it... well, that's not the way I work, that's not the way psychologists are finding people work, and frankly I doubt it's truly the way you work.
4) Empirically, there must be an advantage to sniping. How do I know this? Because successful people do it.
What you describe in #2 is shill bidding. One of the benefits of sniping is to avoid shill bidding, as the seller or their partner wouldn't have time to outbid you, and then retract their bid so that you're the new high bidder at or very near your max.
'4) Empirically, there must be an advantage to sniping. How do I know this? Because successful people do it.'
Automated sniping is a convenience for people who know it is not wise to bid early on in an ebay auction because of the extra attention it brings. More attention normally equals a higher ending price.
It is also good for taking the emotion out of the bidding process, and avoiding emotional bidding wars.
If you feel that there is an advantage with sniping, again, why not snipe yourself? It's not cheating, just smart.
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