[raulus]

I didn't follow these items closely, so this is just my post-action guess: while there were multiple bids on each item, it looks like all of these items had reserve prices, so obviously they didn't meet the reserve.

I think part of the fun is that when an item has a reserve, you need people to keep bidding to get to the reserve. And often once people realize that there is a reserve, they give up and stop bidding. A lot of it just seems to be psychological - why waste your time and effort bidding on something that's not going to sell when you could focus on other stuff?

Others will make this case more stridently than I do, but my experience is that a reserve can really hold an item back. Often a reserve will kick in a few days to a week before the auction ends. At that point, a lot of people will drop out from bidding, and so it never meets the reserve.

A lot of auctions (especially in the current market) see most of their action in the last few days, often even in the last day or the last hour or two. Prices will double, and then double again. Often the reserve process kicks in and shuts down that action entirely. Even if one bidder wants to keep going, they need another bidder to bid against them on a lot of sites to keep the bidding going.

So I'm guessing that's the biggest moral of the story here. Reserves (like snow goons) are bad news.