Ebay still has auctions? I thought it all went Buy It Now years ago.
How eBay can save itself in 1 day
21–25 of 25 posts
Re: How eBay can save itself in 1 day
#22How about you bid your "reservation price" and have no regrets? Simply bid the most you are willing to pay and then last minute bidders won't matter. That is the beauty of a second price auction.
Having the "Three More Hours" feature implemented wouldn't effect the strategy of putting your highest bid in. You could still win with proxy bidding the same way you always have been able to before.
All the feature would do would kill the last-minute folks. Nothing more, nothing less.
All of the "bid and forget it" folks (i envy your discipline) still win if you value it more than the next guy.
Re: How eBay can save itself in 1 day
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A better fix might be to allow sniping (automatic bidding in the last second). In a sense they have that already, since eBay is a (quasi) second-price auction.
What do you mean?
A true second-price auction is one where the bidders (secretly) inform the auctioneer of the maximum price they'd be willing to pay, and the bidder who nominates the highest price wins, but pays the price nominated by the second-highest bidder. This is done in an attempt to eliminate the "winner's curse" and encourage the bidders to nominate their true maximum price. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winner%27s_curse
eBay's proxy bidding system approximates a second-price auction because if everyone enters their true maximum, the person who nominates the highest value will pay (2nd-price + minimum-bid-increment).
Re: How eBay can save itself in 1 day
#24Another fix would be if the exact ending time would not be published. Just something like "This auctions ends in the next 20 minutes".
Re: How eBay can save itself in 1 day
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "I don't know what their reason is" I want to know.
My guess is, they have tried it and it does not work. People don't want to wait around 3 hours to see if they successfully bought something, they want to get confirmation asap.
I know auction sites which set a smaller increment (5-10mins). I do wonder, why eBay hasn't tried it. 3 hours does seem too long.