Seeing Bidding Activity on a lot After An Auction (or not)

winesteven

Sometimes after having bid on a lot, whether I was the high bidder or not, at times I like looking back at the bidding activity after an auction end if it’s available. Some venues, like eBay and Great Collections provide that data. Other venues, such as Heritage, Stacks, Legend, and DLRC do not.

What is your sense for the rationale of the firms’ decision to provide that data, or not? Maybe it’s a technology issue?

Your thoughts?

Steve

yosclimber

On eBay and GC, the bids are all electronic, so it's not too hard to save and display them.
Part of the reason they are displayed is because these businesses started small and needed to show transparency to be trusted.

On the others, bids can be in person and by phone, so bids made that way would have to be typed in by someone in realtime or from a recording and possibly checked for errors. These folks have been around for longer (except for Legend) and already have sufficient trust.

Given that bidders' identities are not always shown, it's unclear to me what benefit would be found from showing the full bid sequence.
What are your thoughts?

ianrussell

One benefit that our transparency shows at GC is how many unique bidders there are at different levels. Another number that is useful to know is how many unique people are tracking a certain coin.

• Ian

jmlanzaf

@yosclimber said:
On eBay and GC, the bids are all electronic, so it's not too hard to save and display them.
Part of the reason they are displayed is because these businesses started small and needed to show transparency to be trusted.

On the others, bids can be in person and by phone, so bids made that way would have to be typed in by someone in realtime or from a recording and possibly checked for errors. These folks have been around for longer (except for Legend) and already have sufficient trust.

Given that bidders' identities are not always shown, it's unclear to me what benefit would be found from showing the full bid sequence.
What are your thoughts?

Stacks and Heritage are simultaneously running online auctions so all those bids are also electronic at the time they are proferred.

BaronVonBaugh

I have used Heritage live bidding before and outbid the people in the room. They have to post the bids live as the auction is going on for me to know where it’s at. So the information is there. It’s either hidden or deleted after the auction.

winesteven

@jmlanzaf said:

Stacks and Heritage are simultaneously running online auctions so all those bids are also electronic at the time they are proferred.

Very true. The same also applies to Legend and DLRC.

Steve

winesteven

@yosclimber said:

Given that bidders' identities are not always shown, it's unclear to me what benefit would be found from showing the full bid sequence.
What are your thoughts?

Mainly curiosity and psychological.

Since the bidding at the VERY end can be fast and furious, it’s difficult (especially at my age, lol) to remember the sequence and pattern of different bidders. Did one of the early bidders place a very high max bid? Did a bidder just try to “nibble away” at the high max bid of someone else? Was the winning bidder bidding on the internet or from the floor, etc. Was the final high bid the first bid placed by that bidder, and only placed at the very end?

Yes, it really doesn’t matter, but in the case of eBay and GC, I find myself sometimes looking at that information, win or lose. I lost out on an item Thursday night at Legend, and would have looked at that data afterwards had it been available, which is what prompted this post!

Steve