How to Win on Ebay: Snipe

grammar fascist writes "A study by South Korean physicists confirms what some of us have taken for granted for a long time: a single bid at end of auction nets the most wins. From the article: 'Plugging all those data into the model and testing the outcome in terms of how the auctions turned out, the team found that the probability of submitting a winning bid on an item indeed drops with each bid. "Our analysis explicitly shows that the winning strategy is to bid at the last moment as the first attempt rather than incremental bidding from the start." The study appears in the current Physical Review E journal.'"

Comments

ebay's fault

[Arthur B.]

Having a limit time is stupid, it challenges the whole auction principle. There should be a limit time, when there is less than 1 hour left, each new bid resets the remaining time to one hour.
Alternatively a blind auction where the winner is the one who offers the highest price and pays the price of the second + a bid increment.