Almost . . . . . .

[magnusfalkirk]

I was watching an auction on eBay last night that ended at 9:00 pm. Someone was selling a copy of FASA's Imperial Data Recovery System for the Apple II. In the last 15 minutes of the auction I bid three times and was outbid every time, so I finally gave up.

I had hoped to win it so that I could have 4am or someone else crack any protection on the disk and make a dsk image available to the community. For any one who doesn't know about this software it was released in 1981 by FASA as a computer supplement for the Traveller RPG.

I'd like to think that whoever won it will make it available to the community eventually.

magnus

[Michael J. Mahon]

When I first started bidding on eBay auctions I had several experiences
very similar to yours. It took me a while to understand that the rapid
“outbids” were the result of eBay’s autobid feature.

The current bid price is actually set by the second highest bidder, because
if the high bidder has bid a high number, autobid will raise the high bid
not to the high bidder’s actual bid, but to one bid increment over the
second highest bidder’s bid.

If the second highest bidder (or someone else) enters a higher bid,
assuming it is not more than the high bidder’s bid, the bid will rise to
the latest bidder’s bid *plus one bid increment* attributed to the high
bidder.

This might seem like a “bid fight” with an aggressive highest bidder, but
it’s just the autobid algorithm responding to your bid(s). If you bid more
than one bid increment over the high bidder’s bid, your bid will take the
lead—but you have no way of knowing what the high bidder’s actual bid was
unless you see the name of the high bidder change. Then you know that their
actual bid was one bid increment less than the bid shown by the new high
bidder.

If someone watching the auction sees that the are no longer the high
bidder, they may raise their bid in a bid fight, but they also don’t know
the actual bid entered by the new high bidder, only that it looks like the
new high bidder just bid one bid increment over the previous leader (maybe
you!). This is emotionally annoying, so the fight may be on!

After several disappointments, I realized that emotional bidding was
dangerous and a better strategy was to simply “lurk” until about 20-30
seconds remained, then enter my only bid, which was the highest price I
would be happy to pay for the item.

This strategy has several advantages:

1) You never bid more than you would be happy to pay.
2) No one has any idea what you’re willing to pay, or even that you have
any interest in the item until there is (almost) no time to respond. This
greatly reduces the chance of emotional bidding, whose only effect is to
frustrate losers and raise prices.
3) If others are using the same strategy, the highest bidder wins in what
is essentially a sealed bid auction.
4) No one using this strategy is disappointed, since they all bid the
maximum price that they would be happy to pay. (Note that this means that
if they bid more and won, they would be disappointed that they had paid too
much.)
5) You may win with a considerably lower bid than you were happy to pay,
and be delighted.
6) The winner pays the lowest price possible, given the interested bidders.
(Good for the buyer, less so for the seller.)

This “sealed bid” strategy works best when bids are submitted *just* before
the auction ends. Since it may be inconvenient to be ready to submit your
“final offer” as the end of the auction approaches, programs have been
written to submit your bid automatically, a fraction of a second before the
auction’s end.

People who don’t like sealed bid auctions refer to this strategy
derogatorily as “sniping”, but those who use this strategy never overpay,
and the only disappointment they may feel is that the item is more valuable
to someone else than it is to them.

--
-michael - NadaNet 3.1 and AppleCrate II: http://michaeljmahon.com

[Oliver Schmidt]

Hi,

Michael J. Mahon <mjm...@aol.com> wrote:
> [detailed eBay bidding tactics description and motivation]

I've always seen it that way - but never found it explained so clearly :-)

Regards,
Oliver

[Steve Nickolas]

The rare times I buy something on-auction, I usually hit it like 5 seconds
from the end.

Usually when I'm looking for something, I block auctions (I am,
unfortunately, a recovering gambling addict).

-uso.

[Steven Hirsch]

(snip..)

Rather than lurk over the bid button, I use eSnipe to automatically bid a few
seconds before auction close. From experience I've found that holding cards
close in this manner reduces activity and improves my win stats. As Michael
suggests, the one-shot, last-minute bid lets you decide just how much the item
is really worth to you and keeps emotions out of the mix.

[magnusfalkirk]

Thanks for all the replies. My main motivation for bidding on the program was to get it preserved for the few people, like myself, who might play the Traveller RPG and also have an Apple II. There are very few Apple II programs for Traveller, less tha a dozen that I have found and downloaded. In fact Edu-Ware got sued by Game Designers Workshop, the company behind Traveller, for releasing two games, Space 1 & 2, which was basically Traveller on the computer, without getting permission from GDW.

[Joshua Bell]

I checked with Marc Miller (creator of Traveller); unfortunately he doesn't have that FASA utility in his archives either.

I left a note for the auction seller (to pass on to the winner) that Marc would be interested in a scan of the manual and copy of the disk, for posterity.

[magnusfalkirk]

Very cool, I hope you get a positive reply from the winner, but I'm noy going to hold my breath on this.