Subject:
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Re: Proxy ratcheting: How do auction systems work?
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.market.auction
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Date:
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Wed, 21 Apr 1999 20:21:42 GMT
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Viewed:
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1026 times
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In lugnet.market.auction, lar@voyager.net (Larry Pieniazek) writes:
> Derick Bulkley wrote:
> > [...]
> > I sure hope somebody can appreciate this ;-)
>
> Well, I can appreciate the technical elegance but I'm not sure I think
> this is a good thing or not. Basically you're saying that as a bidder,
> you can retract the "secret" part of your bid, as long as it hasn't been
> revealed yet.
Allowing someone to lower the "secret" part of the bid (the proxy max) is
Definitely a Good Thing. If the min/current is $x and the max/proxy is $y,
it's important to let the bidder lower $y -- at any time -- to any value
> =$x.
This is psychologically good for the bidder. Well, more accurately, it's
psychologically -not bad- for the bidder. It would REALLY peeve someone off
if they had the high bid at $200 and a proxy max of $600 and they couldn't
lower the proxy max to $300 if their situation suddenly changed. People
want/need to be able to do this in case they suddenly have less money to
throw around (say, for instance, they found a Metroliner somewhere to bid
on).
It's what bidders want, it's easy to implement in a web-based auction, and
it's the Right Thing to do. (See, I'm being opinionated again.) Way to go,
Derick!
> In your scenario, if I came along and put in a 375 proxy just before you
> retracted your 400, it would be too late. Would it not be better to
> train bidders to think about what they bid, realising that they have to
> mean it?
It is always better to train bidders to think about what they bid, yes --
realizing that they have to mean it. But that doesn't mean they shouldn't
be allowed to change their minds from time to time when it doesn't hurt
anyone else. People will change their minds anyway, regardless of what the
software lets them do. The important thing in the 375/400 scenario above is
to make sure the bidder understands when they press the Update button that
there is a slight chance that a new bid might be posted by someone else
between the time the page loaded and the Update button was clicked. If
that's too scary for bidders, you could implement semaphores on a lot-by-lot
basis with 1 minute timeouts and limit their frequency of use to prevent
someone from mischievously preventing anyone else from bidding on a lot.
--Todd
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