Australian Members - Page 1394

Alden tassel loafer in either burgundy or brown calf to be purchased later this week.

Can't decide on colour. Opinions?

I am getting a very uneasy feeling about socks here........

Tough call.

What will you mostly be wearing them with, bman?

Thought of you on Friday when I spied Christian outside Hermes in Collins St sporting a good two inches of mankle.

I do not understand the irrationality around eBay, the bidding process is extremely simple.

 

Put in your maximum bid, being the maximum price you would willingly pay for that good. It doesn't matter when you put in this bid.

 

Sniping is one of the most irrational things I can think of in an economic sense.

Funnily the traditional wear for suede footwear is winter time.

Most don't darken much from the coat.

The coat is useful to repel small splashes of liquid (water, booze, tears, urine) - it beads and rolls off if you look.

Comes into its own in repelling little drops of fats from BBQ, sauce, snotty kids icecream where you have to smile and say "Its ok"..etc

Predominantly chino trousers. Chinos in all colours. From stock standard navy and beige tones, to reds, greens, etc. And denim.

If it's a standard or mid brown I'd lean towards burgundy.

Others probably have a more informed view.

Unfortunately, the people you're bidding against aren't economists. Sniping is rational when your opponents are irrational.

With respect, I disagree with the statement that I've bolded above.

In a blind auction where no-one can possibly know what others have bid, it would not matter when you put in your bid.

However, eBay is not like that. An item might have just been listed with a current price of $0.99 and the auction has five days to run. You decide that you are willing to pay $100 for the item and so you put that in as your max bid. The listing will now show the current bid as $1.99 or whatever the minimum increment might be. Someone else now finds the item and wishes to bid on it, but they don't know how high your bid is, and so they (depending on how much they are willing to pay) put in a bid of $20, so the price increases to $20.99 and you're still in the lead. They then try bidding another $20, only to find that you're still in the lead, and then another $20, only to find that you're still in the lead. The other bidder then drops out, leaving the price at $60.99. You eventually end up winning the auction, but you pay $60.99 for the item.

On the other hand, if you used an eBay sniper like Gixen, you don't bid until the last minute. You've programmed Gixen to put in a max bid of $100, 30 seconds before the auction finishes. There have been a few bids in the meantime, and the price has moved from $0.99 to $20.99. Your bid ends up winning, and you pay $21.99 for the item.

Of course, this is just an example and things don't always work like this. However, based on experience, I've found that putting in your max bid at the last minute via a sniper tends to dramatically reduce price rises over the course of the auction as you don't have people putting in exploratory bids in an attempt to find your max bid amount.

Of course, a sensible, rational person wouldn't put in numerous bids in an attempt to find out someone's max bid amount, but there are a lot of people on eBay who don't behave sensibly or rationally and prices get pushed up as a result.

+1 to this, for the reasons outlined above.

I put in max bids using a sniper all the time.

I am the sniper.

I do understand your example JM, but I still believe it to be irrational for several reasons.

 

Obviously, the second bidder in your example is being ridiculous. Why would they put in a maximum bid originally which was not their maximum bid? For the purposes of the argument, their maximum bid was indeed $60.99, they were just too stupid to realise it or their perception of the item's value magically changed. In your example you assume that by using Gixen, the second bidder won't make a bid at all in the meantime. In reality, there is no reason to believe that the bidder won't have put in their maximum price of $60 in the meantime. If that bidder was going to bid regardless, they would either have put the bid on before you started sniping, or they will themselves be involved in sniping. You will still end up paying the same amount of money.

 

As for "sniping is rational when your opponents are irrational" I still disagree. The only defence of sniping I can think of is that by putting in your maximum bid at the last second, you deprive your opponent of the ability to revisit their perception of the item's value and possibly resubmit a price. This is of course, assuming that your opponent is being irrational. If they are indeed irrational, there's a good chance they've gone into this with a sniping system anyway.

 

Therefore, it's safe to assume that any (or the vast majority) irrational opponent is already using a sniping system. As anyone who has used eBay seriously knows about sniping systems and they are readily and freely available, there can be no value obtained from them, which makes the use of one irrelevant.

 

The easiest, least time consuming, most rational response is therefore to ignore sniping and simply place your maximum bid.

D-Red, I entirely agree that the second bidder in my example was being ridiculous, but such things do actually happen.

Would such a person simply bid $60 if there had not been a max bid already in place? Perhaps so, but to be frank, I don't think so. I think that people can often be strongly influenced by the perceived value that someone else accords to an item and hence, if there are no other bids in place, an eBay bidder (particularly an inexperienced one) may well only place a low bid, with the intention of coming back later to check to see if a higher bid had been placed and, if so, to attempt to place a higher bid and to again take the lead. This happens and, in my opinion, eBay's profits are built on such a bidding model.

The use of a last-minute sniping program does away with much of the above - it means that your bid is not visible until the last minute and so others can't "bid up" in an attempt to top your bid, and the convenience of the sniping program also means that you can simply place your max bid in the sniping program five days or more before the auction closes, with the program placing the bid for you at a predetermined time before the close of the auction (ie 30 seconds or whatever you happen to choose). It's the best of both worlds, really.

You assume that people only put in their "maximum bid" as the absolute max price they are willing to pay. They do not. They put in the maximum price they believe they need to win the auction at any given time, but which is still ≤ their max price. If they are still behind the leader, they will up their price until they reach their true maximum. They have not reassessed their value, only what they think they need to do to beat you. If their true maximum bid is still behind your bid, then you will end up paying the absolute maximum that someone else was willing to pay for the item, rather than a dollar more than what they thought they could get it for.

Ya follow me?

You are absolutely right. It is easier and less time consuming to do this - but like most things in life that are easy and quick it will cost you more money.

I'm not much of an ebayer and when I do it's mostly buy it now stuff. But when you have 5 guys all bidding on one thing, all using a sniper, who wins?