Explain...why do people bid with two minutes to go on an auction??

onebamafan

IMO, it looks like shill bidding... you are obviously watching the auction, so why run up the price? This is becoming way to common. Tonight for example, 42% of a bidders activity with this seller, feedback of 18, come on. The price of the item almost doubled in the last 2+ minutes of the auction. I have seen this a lot recently, with sellers of high feedback , high dollar items and with bids of 15+. Am i just paranoid?? Who are you going to tell, EBAY, right. As long as they get paid, they could care less. Rant over...thanks

jmmiller777

No, not always what it seems. Many times, I just do a simple search for "baseball" under Sports mem, cards and fan shop. I just do a quick scan and occasionably find something that interests me. I lose more than I win, but I do pick up bargains this way. That's why I bid on auctions under 2 minutes. Not sure why others do, and we all know shilling happens.

Griffins

I never bid unless it's the last 4 seconds. I'm sure it's saved me from shilling and by programming in my max bid days before avoids any emotional bidding.
However, given the scenario you presented, with 42% with a seller of 18 feedback, certainly seems suspicious. I'd avoid the seller, snipe or not.

psychump

I work a lot, and with no chance to bid at last minute I give it my best shot at my last available chance. Frank Burns from M.A.S.H. said it best when he said "I'm only paranoid when everybody's against me!".

sbfinley

<< <i>I work a lot, and with no chance to bid at last minute I give it my best shot at my last available chance. Frank Burns from M.A.S.H. said it best when he said "I'm only paranoid when everybody's against me!". >>



This. I snipe, but only on items I really want. I do however watch a lot of items and if I'm at school or work and my my phone buzzes that an auction is about to end I check it. If it's low I'll throw a bid out. And on my iPhone the "item ending soon" alert is completely random. Sometimes it will buzz with 15 mins left then the next time there will be 3 mins left. Don't know what is up with that.

Griffins

<< <i>

<< <i>I work a lot, and with no chance to bid at last minute I give it my best shot at my last available chance. Frank Burns from M.A.S.H. said it best when he said "I'm only paranoid when everybody's against me!". >>



This. I snipe, but only on items I really want. I do however watch a lot of items and if I'm at school or work and my my phone buzzes that an auction is about to end I check it. If it's low I'll throw a bid out. And on my iPhone the "item ending soon" alert is completely random. Sometimes it will buzz with 15 mins left then the next time there will be 3 mins left. Don't know what is up with that. >>



push notifications set to too long a duration?

vintageinvestments

Devil's advocate. I sometimes bid outside of two minutes just to see if I have any competition....and if so I make my final with a few seconds left. As a seller. I have a few that follow me as well and sell both privately to them and on eBay. They will show a high % volume of bidding on my items. As far as shilling goes, I just list what I need minimums for in store format at a set price. Do not assume shill every time you see high % bidders. My 2 cents.

Jason

TmbrWolf22

I will watch an auction from the time it's listed but only bid within the final minute of the auction. I just want the seller to feel like he got his listing fees worth.....lol.

jgrigali

I tend to bid early if I know I won't be able to be around for auction close. Otherwise i will wait til the end and try to save a few dollars. I basically put in what I am willing to pay and don't worry if i get bid up or over bid. As a seller, i just start items at the lowest amount I am willing to accept for the card.

Juggs

I do this sometimes, but it's usually because I'm ADD enough that if I don't get the bid in when I think of it, I'm not going to get a bid in.

I've found something that I've wanted with 2-3 minutes left and known there was no way I was going to last those few minutes to watch it. So, I bid.

Also, I'm a shill.

ClockworkAngel

When a watched item is E-mailed to me, I go in and make the bid as high as I am willing to pay for that particular item. If I get outbid the last 2 minutes, so be it

PowderedH2O

I do the same as Griffins. I set my snipe and I walk away. I do not want the temptation of bidding more than what I really feel a card is worth. I win only about 10% of the snipes I set. Why? Because I am cheap. I will set 50-75 very low snipes in a week, knowing that I am only going to win 7-10 of them...maybe. But, I know that all 7-10 of those will be cards that I paid what I wanted to pay or less. In the event that a boatload of snipes all win, then even better.

onebamafan

i have absolutely no issue with an item doubling in price (if bidding looks legit or sniped). However, for whatever reason i just cant wrap my head around the fact that if you are watching an item with 2 minutes to go, that you would artificially bump up price, even if you win it. If buyers would chill out and relax, then place a bid in the final seconds for what they are willing to pay they could save a few bucks, unless shill bidders are at work against you. Which was the whole premise of the post.

Davemri

Thank goodness for science. How else would we know the best way to nab those barely-used weed whackers, dumbbells or duck-shape salt shakers on eBay? In a study that gives the lie to the notion that eggheads don't like to eyeball online auctions like normal folks, a study by South Korean physicists confirms via some elaborate mathematical modeling that "sniping" — waiting for the very last second to submit your bid on that Elvis-shape throw rug — is indeed "a rational and effective strategy to win in an eBay auction."
Founded in 1995, eBay is the king of online auction sites. Sellers put up items for sale and buyers bid up the price. Thanks to the Internet's lack of state sales tax and the public's thirst for other people's garage sale items, the company has grown into a firm that amassed $4.55 billion in revenue last year. The service sets a deadline on bids for items, which has given rise to the practice of "sniping," bidding at the last minute to deny other bidders time to outbid you.

Savvy buyers have taken to the practice in swarms. Some companies even exist to snipe for you. Sellers, however, have grumbled that the practice keeps winning bid prices lower than they would be in a more open-ended auction, in which prices may be driven up by competition between buyers. If nobody bids until the last second, it's inevitably just a (relatively) low-bidding person who puts in the highest-price bid and walks away with the item.

To test whether sniping is a smart way to do things or just truncates normal bidding, the South Korean team at Seoul National University produced a "master equation" for how bidding proceeds (it's nk(t+1) — nk(t) = w(k-1)(t)*n(k-1)(t) — wk(t)*nk(t) + sigma(k,1)*u(t), if you really want to know), and then tested it against a massive number of auction records, some 264,073 items sold in one day on eBay and another 287,018 items sold in one year by eBay's Korean partner.

Plugging all those data into the model and testing the outcome in terms of how the auctions turned out, the team found that the probability of submitting a winning bid on an item indeed drops with each bid. "Our analysis explicitly shows that the winning strategy is to bid at the last moment as the first attempt rather than incremental bidding from the start." The study appears in the current Physical Review E journal.

The finding is no surprise to Harvard economist Alvin Roth, who has studied sniping from an economics viewpoint since 2002 with colleague Axel Ockenfels of Germany's University of Cologne. They came to similar conclusions. "I think you might do the most good if you advise bidders to form an opinion of how much they are willing to pay for an item, so that they don't get caught up in a bidding war and pay more than they will be happy with," says Roth, by e-mail. "But, that being said, if they know what proxy bid they want to submit, it won't hurt them to submit it very near the end (but neither will it help them much, or often ...) So, sniping is a good strategy, for those with the time to do it," he adds.

A statement on the eBay site says: Sniping is part of the eBay experience, and all bids placed before a listing ends are valid — even if they're placed one second before the listing ends.

bishop

Wonder what that South Korean study cost. I hear they are now trying to identify the speed of dark

epatmythes

<< <i>I will watch an auction from the time it's listed but only bid within the final minute of the auction. I just want the seller to feel like he got his listing fees worth.....lol. >>



+1

Klif50

If I am only bidding on a few items I will sometimes watch the clock tick down on them. If I get outbid and there are 2 minutes left I'll toss in my highest bid since I don't snipe. If that is overbid I might make one more valiant effort and up the bid and if I win I'm happy and if not, I gave it my best shot at a price I was "really" willing to pay. And when I see a snipe bid come in at the last second of an auction I know I've been outbid and there isn't enough time to toss in another bid so I've lost that one. You win some, you lose some, some I shouldn't bid on at all. But no collusion with the seller and I play my own strategy as most other bidders do. If I lose, no harm, no foul, if i win, so much the better.

WinPitcher

Sometimes people bid within the closing 2-3 minutes to position themselves
especially if the item is at market and to get out bid means the winner would pay over market.

drewsef

<< <i>Thank goodness for science. How else would we know the best way to nab those barely-used weed whackers, dumbbells or duck-shape salt shakers on eBay? In a study that gives the lie to the notion that eggheads don't like to eyeball online auctions like normal folks, a study by South Korean physicists confirms via some elaborate mathematical modeling that "sniping" — waiting for the very last second to submit your bid on that Elvis-shape throw rug — is indeed "a rational and effective strategy to win in an eBay auction."
Founded in 1995, eBay is the king of online auction sites. Sellers put up items for sale and buyers bid up the price. Thanks to the Internet's lack of state sales tax and the public's thirst for other people's garage sale items, the company has grown into a firm that amassed $4.55 billion in revenue last year. The service sets a deadline on bids for items, which has given rise to the practice of "sniping," bidding at the last minute to deny other bidders time to outbid you.

Savvy buyers have taken to the practice in swarms. Some companies even exist to snipe for you. Sellers, however, have grumbled that the practice keeps winning bid prices lower than they would be in a more open-ended auction, in which prices may be driven up by competition between buyers. If nobody bids until the last second, it's inevitably just a (relatively) low-bidding person who puts in the highest-price bid and walks away with the item.

To test whether sniping is a smart way to do things or just truncates normal bidding, the South Korean team at Seoul National University produced a "master equation" for how bidding proceeds (it's nk(t+1) — nk(t) = w(k-1)(t)*n(k-1)(t) — wk(t)*nk(t) + sigma(k,1)*u(t), if you really want to know), and then tested it against a massive number of auction records, some 264,073 items sold in one day on eBay and another 287,018 items sold in one year by eBay's Korean partner.

Plugging all those data into the model and testing the outcome in terms of how the auctions turned out, the team found that the probability of submitting a winning bid on an item indeed drops with each bid. "Our analysis explicitly shows that the winning strategy is to bid at the last moment as the first attempt rather than incremental bidding from the start." The study appears in the current Physical Review E journal.

The finding is no surprise to Harvard economist Alvin Roth, who has studied sniping from an economics viewpoint since 2002 with colleague Axel Ockenfels of Germany's University of Cologne. They came to similar conclusions. "I think you might do the most good if you advise bidders to form an opinion of how much they are willing to pay for an item, so that they don't get caught up in a bidding war and pay more than they will be happy with," says Roth, by e-mail. "But, that being said, if they know what proxy bid they want to submit, it won't hurt them to submit it very near the end (but neither will it help them much, or often ...) So, sniping is a good strategy, for those with the time to do it," he adds.

A statement on the eBay site says: Sniping is part of the eBay experience, and all bids placed before a listing ends are valid — even if they're placed one second before the listing ends. >>



where is dpeck at?