Quote:
Originally Posted by Snowman
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.
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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.