Posted By:
AaronI was extremely impressed with the REA auction. I genuinely hope some of his "innovations" (really just long overdue auction reforms) become industry standard. Specifically:
1. The Honest Auto-Bid format. Similar to E-Bay, Robert Lifson instituted this system to ensure that no one other than the bidder himself knew what his/her max bid was. I'd love to hear from other successful bidders if their winning bids fell below their max bid and compare that result to past auctions.
2. REA employees and executives were not allowed to bid on REA auctions. This seems like such an obvious conflict of interest that instituting this reform would seem a no-brainer.
3. Consignors to REA auctions were not allowed to bid on their own lots. Again, a no-brainer.
4. REA did not own any of its lots. Again, this seems like an avoidance of such an obvious conflict of interest.
Other notes: REA had superb customer service through the bidding process (now let's see how quickly they process their sales and ship to winning bidders). Very prompt, friendly and informative communication. On the negative side, REA has to increase the bandwidth on their site. It was very, very slow and contained several programming glitches.
I won the REA 1910-15 Cubs pennant and was very happy with the final price. I was also going to bid to win the "Keep The Dodgers in Brooklyn" pin, but after searching for an example for almost a year, a better condition pin popped up on E-Bay this week. (I won the E-Bay pin for a lower price than the REA pin ended up going for.) All in all a pretty perfect day for my collection!