[raulus]

It’s always fun to speculate about a situation like this, particularly when it’s two cards for the same player, same year, same grade, same auction, and the final prices are so far out of whack.

Usually the centering acolytes will come out in force and go to town to explain centering as the primary driver of the differences. And that could be the case here.

Others have also mentioned other condition issues, which is also a possibility.

Here’s my guess, which is a lot less about the cards, and a lot more about human nature:

When the bidders were checking out this auction, they made a decision about which of these two cards they liked the best, and they decided to chase that one. Once they had self selected into those silos, it was just a question of when the underbidder was going to drop out and stop bidding. And that happened earlier on the one that went for cheap.

It’s possible that some bidders decided to put in bids on both pieces, and shifted back and forth as price disparities grew. But level-headed bidders like that probably don’t possess the animal spirits necessary to really win a bidding war like we get these days on a lot of pieces.

As much as we like to think that there’s a rational explanation for everything, and centering and condition will always dictate outcomes, my experience suggests that it’s often just a question of who gets in and hangs on, and how long they decide to keep bidding.

Part of the magic with auctions like this one is also the closing mechanism, which might play into my suppositions. If people stop bidding on the cheaper one, then it closes and it’s done. There’s no going back later to bid more. It’s possible that they were a lot closer when extended bidding got started, and then one of them took off while the other one just closed. In this case, however, looking at the bidding history, it appears to not be the case.

Looking at the bidding detail, it looks like there was really just one bidder who went nuts on the more expensive one during extended bidding, and ran it up from $3,500 to $4,200 (before the juice) in the span of about 30 seconds. I’m interpreting the bidding to suggest that someone put in a very high max bid, and then went to bed, while someone else decided they couldn’t live without it and stayed up late to run up the price before finally deciding to bow out. And that doesn’t appear to have happened on the cheaper version, as there was only 1 bid during the extended period.

So my answer is that the difference is more about somewhat irrational human behavior and less about being cold calculating value determining machines who act with perfect reason and cool hands in the face of an auction closing when bidding on precious pieces that we’ve set our hearts on.

And that goes double these days, when the person willing to bid the most recklessly ends up determining auction prices on a lot of pieces.