Never said it was the only thing. Just a major factor. Do you disagree with that as well?
I do - it's part of the picture, but not the biggest part; if a mere handful are willing to pay $1000 for M.C. when as many copies (or more) have been sold off eBay for considerably less, then those few high priced sales are not setting the worth of the hundreds of other copies in existence. By the way, why are you so focused on M.C.? It's relative rarity makes it a rather different kettle of fish compared to 99.9999999999% of other auctions.
Fairly likely, yes. But who knows? And what if the item was ~$100 and rarely came along? Would you not for a moment question spending an additional 2% to get yourself the item now instead of later?
I'd gladly pay the $2 not to have to wait for another month.
Then you were willing to pay $102 (or $105, or $110, etc.) and should have bid accordingly. You might want to rethink your definition of 'max bid' - to me and other logically minded fellows, it means
the most I'd comfortably be willing to pay, not some pie in the sky, hoped for price.
Think about this for a moment - could it be that the fear of being sniped sometimes leads people to artificially inflate their maximum bids, and ultimately the item's market value? Could it be that in an ebay without sniping, for every instance of an item's end-price going up because of additional bids in overtime, there would be another item that sells for less because people bid a little more sincerely?
The only way this works is if snipers quit bidding all together, which obviously won't happen. They'll just place their bids earlier, more people will react/overreact and place higher bids than they intended (part of your constant reevaluation of worth), and the ending values would be higher. Despite what you believe, that's not a good thing.
At least both results are fair. Sniping, on the other hand, is ultimately nothing more than a sneaky trick.
It's so sneaky that everyone knows about it and expects it.
You're trying to prevent your competition from having a chance to bid higher than you.
No, I'm trying to prevent others from
rebidding higher (there's a difference). Besides resellers looking to flip pricier items, it's people like you that keep re-upping their bid by a few dollars to try and top the current high bidder that are driving up prices. Sniping is a defense against such silliness.
You say that they should have bid higher in the first place, when all they were trying to do with their less-than-true-max bid was keep the price from flying out of control and save money - the very same thing you're trying to do. The difference is that they weren't trying to wholly prevent anyone from outbidding them.
Less than 10% of my bid snipes are successful, either because bidding has already progressed beyond my snipe amount, due to a more aggressive sniper, or because a previous bidders max bid was higher, so others are obviously getting their chance to win.
It works, and I've done it, but sniping is devious and unnecessary in online auctions. That real-life auction houses use a "going once, going twice" type of system and both buyers and sellers seem to prefer this is indication enough that forced end-times are ebay's bad design. Yahoo proves that there's no reason why an internet auction can't be just like a real auction in this case.
Have you been to a live auction? It's hardly uncommon for someone to wait for the last moment to start bidding, leaving others very little time to 're-evaluate' what they're willing to bid. Consequently, bidders have already set in their minds what their
max bid is. Do you see where I'm going with this?
Well, either that or don't say shit when the guy - a stranger who owes you nothing after your transaction is complete - sells it for $100.
No thanks, I'm a adult. If someone takes his good fortune and parlays it into a payday by f*cking someone over, I'll bitch about it all I want (a.k.a. - verbally throwing them on the ground!).
