@femmefan1946 wrote:
Because many people can't understand proxy bidding.
Or they are nervous and prefer to bid a little at a time.
Or they like to get caught up in the thrill of the auction action.
I've been involved with a public, called, catalogued, auction for over 30 years. We have floor bidders, mail bidders, (and fax and email), telephone bidders, bidding agents, and online bidders.
Sometimes a floor bidder will be very upset because he thinks an employee is bidding against him, although that bidder is actually holding a landline telephone and reporting bids from some guy in Australia -- or at his office.
and
@femmefan1946 wrote:
And of course the manual bidder can be the winner.
He just has to bid higher than the proxy bidder.
High bid wins.
Though consider:
Real-life proxy bidding still has the in-house proxy bidder agents having the lag of human reaction, this isn't the case with eBay's proxy bidding system where the computer performing the proxy bidding can get under the closing garage door with 10s of miliseconds to spare and there is no reaction time possibility from manual bidders, so in essence manual bidders are forced to overpay in order to secure the item (thus my $10 million hyperbole comment) so that they're bidding in the range of insanity that obviously everyone else would assume they're crazy.
Real life proxy bidding still requires human intervention, a human who has the same rough frailties as those floor bidders, but eBay's is again is done by computers directly inside eBay's network that even if someone manually bids at 100 miliseconds from auction close, the proxy bidding system can get in at 50-90.
The only real-life analogue to eBay's system would be for the auctioneer to have a sheet of paper with maximum bids and be himself inputting figures into the ledger on behalf of proxy bidders "Automatic bid for $400", "That lady $450", "Automatic bid for $500", "That man $550", "Going once... going twice...." — you'd be bidding against the auctioneer themselves and they can still input into the ledger just before the auction closing: "...Automatic bid for $600 and SOLD to the proxy bidder" — THIS is why eBay's system is toxic in its current form.
eBay's bidding system is less of a "who can outbid others" and more of "who can outbid others with speed to undercut the competition", just like HFT has become at the stock markets where they're pushing the boundaries of nanosecond timing to get the cheapest rate for the highest benefit where the rest of the market can't react to those algorithms. The only difference with HFT is that fairness is imposed by anti-fraud regulation and industry controls, where someone couldn't install a server right in the same rack as the stock market's transaction servers. in eBay's case, perhaps it is the same application server that processes your bid that does the automatic bidding in which case see my previous paragraph.
I don't have qualms with the house having people bidding on behalf of people, but I do have qualms with machines bidding on behalf of people as those machines always have the advantage of speed thus no reaction time being available to you. The true (but not only) resolution for this to make things fair would be for eBay to hire people to act as proxy bidding agents and remove the automated system. The other alternative would be to impose a delay on all automatic bids before they are allowed to be processed, where it is fully possible for an automatic bid to lose due to being too late.
