eBay Accused of Price Gouging Scheme

Symbiot writes "eBay is being sued in a Calilfornia court for a practice that the plaintiff, Glenn Block of Pennsylvania, claims artificially raises the amount of a bid. The practice combines the warning emails that eBay sends out when you are the highest bidder and your bid is at your maximum, with the bid increment mechanism. It seems that if your original maximum bid settnig prevents your current bid from falling on an increment then your current bid will be raised to the next increment as soon as you raise your maximum. If the plaintiff wins this class action suit could cost eBay tens or hundreds of millions of dollars."

Comments

Re:EBay; conflict of interest in their two roles

[bwt]

Conflict of interest.

How does the exectution of a proxy bidding algorithm whose workings are fully disclosed ahead of time constitutue an "interest". You only can have a conflict of interest when you are exercising discretion in some way and a simultenous duty to use your discretion to benefit different goals. If you have no discretion, the whole question is moot. At every step, all bidders and the seller can rely on ebay behaving in the pre-ordained way.

Your statement is sort of like saying the rules of chess have a conflict of interest between the white pieces and the black pieces.