Posted By:
Jeff SGreg:
That is certainly true: if auctioneers felt that they were getting less money for their items than they otherwise would, they would shift to other methods. (Case in point: I'm much more likely to use methods other than eBay to move a card than I was a year ago, for a variety of reasons not relevant here.)
But if anything, your point indicates that bidder collusion is not a significant problem.
Lipset, Sloate, Mastro, etc., are all very smart guys (or so it seems to me, who has never met any of them). People with their kind of industry connections would, I think, take advantage of whatever selling method they could that nets them the largest profit, and that certainly doesn't have to be a catalog auction format.
But they don't.
Obviously, all of these auctioneers are well aware of bidder collusion in its many forms, and realize that regardless of whatever warnings they place in their auction rules, this practice will go on largely unchecked.
Yet despite this "problem," these auctioneers persist in doing catalog auctions that have minimum bids that are way, way below "retail", usually (I imagine) well below their investment.
In other words, they believe bidder collusion, if it occurs, isn't a big enough problem to merit a change of format.
And judging from auction results for as long as I've been following them (a few years, anyway), it isn't a big enough problem to keep them from getting fair (often much more than that) prices for their items.