I am by far not a data scientist, but I would think it would be in the best interest of the bidder on the whole set to have the individual lots stay as low as possible.

I think both sides should be allowed to increase their own bid during extended bidding.

• The aggregate price goes higher than the high set bid. This notifies everyone who is bidding, including the set bidder.
• The set bidder increases their bid and they are now the high bidder.
• Then it is up to the collective group of individual bidders to bid up the cards, or if they are high bidder to pay a bit more to win their card or loose it.
• The bidders on the individual lots increase their bids, maybe some don't and either they top the set bid or they all loose out.

This gives the advantage to the bidder on the full set as their bid increase can guarantee high bid, however that increase is a much larger amount than what each individual bidder would have to come up with.

I'm not a data scientist either but it seems counterintuitive to me that the best strategy is to try to win 12 lots rather than trying to win one.

I believe most would agree with you. But given the format parameters* of this particular auction, it was the only way one could guarantee winning all 12 cards (since there wasn't enough activity on the full set auction). Otherwise you are taking a risk.

*
- Cannot raise your own bid if you are already high bidder
- Each of the 13 lots end individually
- winner of 12 cards based on higher closing price of individual lots vs set.

I feel fairly certain that one call to HA would have allowed a high aggregate bidder to raise his own bid if he was locked out by the system.

...but after reading this thread for the past few days, I kinda sorta want to be a data scientist!? haha

Great read and I hadn't really had anything to add to the discussion (and still don't except to joke as I just did). So I lurked.....

Sorry it worked out the way it did for Powell! If you're still reading, Powell, I do have a few cards from your t206 set that was at the DIA in my set now. They're noted so in 20-30 years when it's time for me to sell it, I can let the buyer know where it came from before me. Great knowing a small part of my t206 set came from yours!

Troy Rambo

Sad
 

Sad how this worked out, but very classy by everyone on here. I think letting the results stand was probably the only real choice, but how sad for Powell as he did nothing wrong, and in good faith thought he was winning.

I think Powell is a class act, the way he, in a mature fashion, handled this tragedy for himself. I hope in the future he is able to find some BGers for his collection.

Maybe I’m missing something simple here and it could be because I generally don’t buy a lot in auctions like this.

If there was one auction for the entire lot and 12 individual auctions for the cards there has to be an ending time, right? If there is an extension of the ending time due to bids coming in in a certain timeframe then there is some point where bids stop coming in and the extended time stops right?

So when the extended time for the set and the extended time for each of the 12 lots finally stops, which ever amount is higher, the set bid or the individual lot bids, that’s who should get the winnings.

If their system sent Powell a message telling him that he won, one would naturally assume that the time had elapsed on the set bid extended time, and the individual lot extended time and their system then determined him to be the winner. If they told him he won then he won and should get the entire set.

Lots in HA do not end at a specific time but rather after a certain period (30 min I think here) of inactivity on that lot.

My point is the same. There is some point in time that the bidding time has ended. At that point the system has to look at the bids and determine the winner. If their system sent Powell an email or a message or some kind of electronic signal that he won the set then his set bid must have been more than the calculated bids of all 12 cards individually. The set is his.

Joking/not joking:

Are you deliberately trying to restart this discussion at the beginning?

Because I think about 50 people (including Powell himself) made this exact argument about 6 pages ago. And we’ve spent the last 300 posts picking that argument up and examining it from most every side.

But maybe you skipped over that discussion?

For individual lots that ended earlier or at the same time, those guys almost certainly got a message THEY had won the lot. That's just the software doing its thing. It wasn't doing any comparing, because the software did not link all the lots together. Powell did not win the set, because some of the individual lots were still open and the sum ended hgher. The unfairness is Powell was unable to continue bidding. But that doesn't make him the winner.

Anyhow, it's all moot now.

This would be another example of why you need to control both sides of the auction. You can't know ahead of time which side might have that one guy that is willing to go to the moon, but if you can continue to bid on the other side, you can shut him out as long as you have enough competition on the other side to overtake him. But if there's no competition on that other side, then you won't have that option available to you, and you'd have to take him on head to head. Basically, you have to be willing to take on all bidders on both sides in order to guarantee a win. You can switch which sides you bet on, but you only switch sides due to action by other bidders forcing you to switch, not by your own action on the other side. Because if your action on the other side is sufficient to overtake, you won't need to bid again. You're always overtaking someone else, never yourself.

Honestly, it's a non optional strategy for the auction house to run it this way. It almost ensures the hammer price is less than if it had been individual lots only. Especially for something easily trackable like a set of 12 cards.

The last point is interesting. Is that because there are guys like Powell who just bid on the set side who otherwise would be pumping up the individual lots in an effort to win them all?

Because there was no issue for a month. The issue came in when the set improperly closed while bidding on the individual cards was still active, preventing the competition that is the point of an auction.

To those of you who keep pointing out the verbiage of the auction, this seems to be what you're not getting. Yes Powell knew there was a chance the individual lots could be the winner, but he did NOT know he wouldn't be allowed to compete with those bidders.

Bidding on the set only gives you the opportunity to win the set for less than you might otherwise have to pay were you to bid on all lots, but it also places you at risk of losing altogether since in this format, you get shut out without another set bidder to compete against. So it is optimal in the sense that it is the most likely route to the cheapest win, but it is non optimal if the goal is to guarantee a win, which it cannot do. The only way to guarantee a win is to bid on all lots on both sides like playing a game of Whack-a-Mole.

Thats the part that confused me. Why didn't anyone think about that before hand? From my limited experience, it seems most auctions you need someone else to bid against you to raise your bid. Wasn't it obvious there was a huge risk that it wouldn't be possible to win the set if there was only one bidder? Therefore you would have to bid on every card to make sure you won

Then why even have a set option? Michael pointed out how easy it is to run both fairly in an auction in a previous post, it makes no sense how one of the biggest AH would screw it up so badly with their format.

Because there's no way the set should've closed while the individual lots were still open. That has NEVER been how this style of auction has run before. So no, it shouldn't have been obvious.

[QUOTE=Snowman;2378396]Bidding on the set only gives you the opportunity to win the set for less than you might otherwise have to pay were you to bid on all lots,

Explain to me how this is true? I must not be understanding something.

The set price cannot win if it’s less than aggregate of individual lots, so how could you win the set lot at a price lower than you’d could win the summation of each individual lot?

Based on how this auction was run, I have no idea on the purpose of the set lot ever being offered. What was the purpose?

Which is why, as I said in my initial post, "The aggregate total of the single lots should have been treated as another bidder in the full set auction, with the time on the full set auction not ending until no bids had been placed for 30 minutes on any of the individual or full auctions."

Yes, exactly. It doesn't benefit the consigner at all, in this case, to offer the set separately. It can only hurt them because all competitive set buyers would still bid their maximums in aggregate across the 12 lots, but they could get shut out if they only bid on one side and run out of competition on their side to keep them in the running with the other side.

In practice, it's more a convenience to set bidders than it is a bid maximization tool for the consigners, at least with a set this small where bidding both sides is easy to manage. If it were 1952 Topps, then ensuring you are the high bidder on each individual lot is much more challenging, and would result in most set bidders not wanting to bid that way. So offering both makes some sense there because it's very unlikely you're getting bidders to try to win every single lot otherwise. But in that case, you'd definitely want to allow set bidders to outbid the aggregate singles lots even if there is only one set bidder remaining. This allowance would make the "bid both sides" strategy pointless, and should have been implemented in this auction. But it wasn't. Hence the need to bid both sides.

Because the Heritage rep was operating under the false assumption that it would yield the maximum amount for the consigner, which would only be true if the bidding pool for both sides consisted of truly independent buyers. But they're not. Every set bidder would have bid on all individual lots had the set lot not been an option. It was an error on their part, and they likely still don't even know it. And they also probably still believe it netted the seller the most money, and they'll probably do it again next time.

Yep, this is the key. All lots should remain open together until there is no more bidding on any of the lots. And the aggregate of the individual bid amounts must act as a proxy bid that the high bidder from the set lot can bid against at all times. Without these two rules in place, the dualing auctions format fails to achieve its goal.

Okay, I'm not sure I understand your poimt , are you defending Heritage for not knowing how o run an auction of this magnitude?

[QUOTE=mordecaibrown;2378408]If you can successfully shut out the bidders on the individual side by not bidding against them, and them not otherwise having enough action to overtake the full set bid, then you can win it for less if your full set high bid amount is less than the sum of the individual lots plus whatever it would take for you to take the high bid on each of those lots. This is why you only bid on one side at a time, and why you only switch sides when forced to by the other bidders.

No. They're idiots.

Even for a set this small, it can be more than just a convenience to set bidders to allow them to bid on the set as an individual lot; it can be the prerequisite to bid at all. And I'll take my case in this auction to make the point. I bid on only the set, and if not allowed to do that, I would not have bid at all. To me it was all or none; if I could not have the full set, I was not interested. I had a limit in my mind as to how high I would go. Think now about the alternative I would have been faced with if I had to bid on the cards individually. In order to remain high bidder on each individual card to remain in the running to win all 12, I could have been forced to raise my bid on an individual card to remain high bidder on that card, but by so doing I would exceed my limit for the set. And if I didn't raise it, I could end up winning all the other cards in the set. Either situation would not work for me, and as a result I would not bid at all.

To go further, besides the advantage offering the set as an individual lot offers to a bidder such as me, it has no down-side to the consigner. It brings more bidders in (in this example, me) thus creating the possibility for the aggregate of the 12 cards to be higher than it would otherwise be. And if done properly, no bidder on an individual card would run out of competition because once he saw that the set price exceeded the total of the individual cards, the effect was he had been outbid on that card and would have known he had to raise his bid. And that is exactly what we saw here. Powell stated that if allowed to, he would have raised his bid, and depending on how high he was willing to go, could have raised the set price to a level that exceeded what the individual cards ended up selling for, thereby netting more for the consigner. And if the cycle repeated itself, more money would flow to the consigner.

Most of the focus has been on the full set lot closing so Powell couldn't raise his bid on it once the total of the individual lots went above it, but even if the lot stayed open, he may not have been able to raise his bid because he was bidding against himself.

Wouldn't the same thing have happened with the individual lots? If the high bid for the total set lot had been higher then the combined total of the individual lots, if someone was the high bidder on one of the individual lots and wanted to increase their bid so the individual lots total was higher, they probably wouldn't have been able to either because they would also be bidding against themselves.

I've never bid in auctions like this but several have commented about other AHs running similar types of auctions. Apparently, those have had all the lots linked together to show whether the set or the individual lots were ahead and everything stayed open until none of the lots had bids for a period of time, but how did they handle the issue of a current high bidder increasing their bid on an individual lot or the total set lot to change which side was winning? Were bidders able to increase their own high bid or did they have to talk to someone at the AH to get it done for them?

If the software was set up properly, they would have been able to increase their own bids without contacting the AH.

Bingo. If Heritage allowed for “straight bids” instead of just “max bids”, then Powell could have kept bidding against himself and theoretically kept the set lot open. Or at least unilaterally raised the price on the set lot. Without that option, he was at the mercy of having a dance partner to keep bidding against him on the set lot, thereby enabling the set lot to keep rising in price above the price at which the individual lots were closing in the aggregate.

Some AHs, but not all, do allow for straight bids.

So I suppose there’s another strategy to take here if you only want to bid on the full set. Enter into an alliance with a buddy who will keep bidding against you on the set side so that you don’t get locked out. Just make sure you have a safe word for when it’s time to tap out!

One thing that hasn't been discussed but I wonder about is what if, when Powell was the high bidder but before he was locked out, he had put in say an $800k limit bid. My guess is that the auction software would have still recorded him as the winner than night, but what would HA have done the next morning when the dust settled? His high bid on the auction program would have been unchanged (since no one outbid him on the aggregate lot) but by his limit bid he expressed a willingness to bid higher than the sum of the individual bids. Would he have been declared the winner at one increment over the sum of the individual bids or would his limit bid have been ignored since it was never executed by the auction software? If he had done that he would have had even a stronger case to be the winner. BTW, this is just after the fact pontificating; I am not saying that Powell should have realized this at the time.

In that scenario awfully hard for Heritage to say he didn't win.

As I understand it, the mechanics here are simple. Perhaps excessively simple given the stakes.

Wait until all lots are closed. Then add up the final price on all the individual lots. Compare it to the final price on the set lot. Whichever is highest, wins.

If accurate, then putting in a higher max bid doesn’t do any good, unless someone actually triggers it by bidding against you ON YOUR SPECIFIC LOT.

Edited to add the all caps bit.

Right, it would not have kicked in, but IMO it makes his case on the equities airtight. He had the highest bid, regardless whether the stupid software took it.

By this time, it seems everyone has given thoughtful input and advice… most of which is very astute. Wouldn’t it be nice if Heritage would post something here? They used to have a guy who posted here with regularity, mostly to promote upcoming auctions.

It just seems to me that they should post something here to clarify their stance, and perhaps more importantly to advise us with plans to remedy these types of problematic situations, moving forward. Is that asking too much?

No, it is not asking too much. There is a real problem with admitting mistakes in today's culture.

Pete Calderon used to post for Heritage, if memory serves.

Agreed, with one caveat. Someone (or multiple someones) might have max bids on the individual lot side as well. For all we know, someone really wanted one of those individual lots, and put a max bid of a cool $1M on it.

Fair. In a just world you would need to do apples to apples.

Not going to defend HA here.

But I’m not sure they have much to gain by posting.

Just guessing at this part! -> Especially if they’re ignoring the whole situation. Perhaps because in their mind everything went down as planned. Might even be oblivious to the whole situation.

Now if they expected to make some changes because they learned something, then a post would be a better idea.

They don't care and for good reason. In a week we will all forget.

Post #18 of this thread... hi Pete!

Maybe some, but not Powell

It's been a long time since I've checked records, but I know we had a complete set of these 1914. Pretty sure we had a complete (or near) 1912 set as well.

If I recall correctly, the 1912s sold privately, while the 1914 set was sold in the higher-end catalog we did. This was maybe 10 years ago, so my memories could be off a bit.

Always loved these cards, along with the other display materials one could have with them!

Hi Doug! I hope all is well with you and your family. I still fondly remember going up with Richard and my younger son, Matt, to see your family collection about ten years ago. Your museum was incredible.

Kind words, and I very much remember those days as well. Sometimes it seems so long ago, but certain things bring it back very vividly!

All is well here, now doing a lot of work for museums and national touring exhibitions. Still collecting a bit (though mostly game-worn Mike Trout stuff).

Hope you and the family are well. Would be great to catch up sometime!

For context.

https://www.sportscollectorsdaily.co...ed-to-auction/

Not to derail this thread too much

I was fortunate to visit Doug & Chad's museum & spend the day there
Incredible! They even served lunch :)
Fantastic hosts!

Room after room of cards & memorabilia, & not just sports.
Like Fonzi & Arnold's Terminator jackets, a whole room of Lucy memorabilia
pinball machines, tobacco shop posters from Allen & Ginter, Duke's, Kimball's etc..
& a whole room w/ binder after binder of cards, I spent awhile just on the N284 Buchner binder.

Here's a shot of my wife Carole, standing next to a life size Shaq bobblehead wearing his game used jersey.
Flanked on the walls, were jersey's of Kobe, Elgin & Kareem & Kareem's crutches
& she's holding Shaq's sneaker, so big she could sleep in it

https://www.qualitycards.com/picture...dreierfest.jpg

I recently just picked up this piece. It was in a book of other drawings related to a lot of different products. I just thought this one was cool and timely due to the recent Boston Garter sale.