Re: Old Hardware Recovery

Cameron Biggart wrote:
Well there are 2 nibbles on e-bay and it's up to $26 so I think you're out of luck. It's not the Mega$$$'s yet but who knows. 

Despite everything eBay would tell you to the contrary, it is actually
to your benefit to bid late in most cases.  True, mathematically, since
it's a second-price auction, the high bid is going to be the same
regardless of when you make your bid as long as the bid is for the
same amount.

But that ignores a few real world, practical considerations that don't
figure into the formulae for second-price auctions.  The first is that
all outstanding bids are liabilities, because IF you win (and you don't
know if you will), you have to shell out the money.  And, all other
things being equal, you want to have a liability of a given size for
the shortest time possible.  Later bids accomplish this for you.

The second is that, if you are looking at an item which is close to
a commodity, and if you only want exactly one of them, it makes sense
to delay committing to one item until the latest possible moment,
because every second you wait, you potentially gain information about
which are the best ones to bother with.  There is no point in bothering
with one that's already near your maximum price with a fair amount of
time left.

The third reasons is that, if you are looking at something whose value
is hard for some people to determine (such as an antique), and if you
have a good amount of knowledge about that type of item, then making
your bid early can actually generate interest in the item.  If something
is worth $500 but people don't know whether it's worth $5 or $10,000,
then when you put in a bid for $300, that alerts some people that this
item might be more worthwhile than they think, and they might outbid you
on the assumption that you're hoping to get a bargain at $300.
Especially if you use eBay a lot and other bidders know that you know
your stuff and that you know the right amount to bid on things.

The point here is that bidding late is a rational strategy for various
reasons, which means that you should expect that the price of your item
will grow a lot toward the end of the auction.  In fact, even in a
7-day auction, it's quite possible for the price to double in the last
hour or even the last 10 minutes.  In reality, the only rational reason
to explain why eBay allows you to leave the auction open for periods
as long as 7 days is that the first 6 days and 12 hours are a nice way
of advertising your product and making people aware that it's for sale.
(And the advertising generates more interest if people believe that
the auction has already started.)

So anyway, the point is that high bid on your auction 2 days into a
7 day auction doesn't really give you very much information at all
about what the closing price will be.  You can get a much more accurate
estimate by searching for similar items and limiting the search to
completed items to see what those similar items sold for, then making
adjustments based on differences between your item and the similar
items.

If you had ended up with it of course you would have sat it on a shelf and thought 'I must get around to doing something with that' for a few years and then finally flogged it off on e-bay when your SO needed the space.

Ahh recusrion. 

There are compilers that can rid of that, you know.  But what they can't
get rid of is infinite loops.

  - Logan
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Buy-it-now / end early dilemma
    ... and one bid will take it. ... If he wins the auction as the only ... I've decided on a BIN price, just like there's no reason to ever raise your ...
    (alt.marketing.online.ebay)
  • Re: "Auction Canceled"
    ... The point is that the price depends on exactly what individuals really ... form one auction to the next in the real world. ... if not you'll have to bid ... You know the minimum sale price, the last thing you want to ...
    (alt.games.warcraft)
  • Re: Professors unlock key to Ebay sales
    ... if not the last 5 minutes of the auction. ... put for the Starting Bid Price, ... I have to figure out MY magic formula to get the bid prices as high as ... These aren't Anita, Ira, or Wes coins. ...
    (rec.collecting.coins)
  • Re: OT: another happy Ebay story
    ... Bidding as the auction goes along tends to get people ... bidders, I will bid the minimum, just in case no one else bids. ... When you "win" an auction it means you were willing to pay more than ... "Winning" is getting something you wanted for a price that you ...
    (alt.guitar.bass)
  • Re: Sony 6800
    ... the auction should end right then and there. ... members would bid up the price to see to it that legitimate bidders paid ... their maximum bid. ... The real problem with e-Bay is that it tends to attract a very large ...
    (rec.radio.shortwave)