Posted By:
warshawlawon ebay I snipe anything I really want but will bid the minimm or a suitably lowball price on something I would not mind owning at a lowball price. I always walk away, however, and rarely ever bid again. I also like to snipe to prevent fishing for my max--if I am not known to be a bidder until the last minute, no one can shill me.
I do not win lots from mastro, so no point in discussing that 
I have won lots well below my max from 19th Century Only, Lew Lipset and Clean Sweep so I would commend those auctioneers as running honest auctions. I was in fact pleasantly surprised to come away from the recent CS auction with an Exhibit Salutations Williams #9 showing for $41 (I'd gone nearly twice that as a max bid). I do not believe that much of the max bid winning is due to shilling on the auctioneers' part; rather, it is due to the winning bidder's analysis of the cards' values matching those of most other astute buyers. I think that has a lot to do with why many wins are at the max for many of us; the perfect market theory in action (i.e., the better the information available, the better the analysis of every rational economic actor, and the more prices will tend to an equilibrium point reflecting true value). In general when it comes to auction houses, I am not willing to bid until the last day because I don't need the stress of riding out my bid.
Since I have spent so much time looking at prices for my boxing card guides, I think there are also some innate tendencies people have when it comes to analyzing numbers (and there some psychological research to back up human tendencies towards pattern making, which would support this theory), such as rounding to the next increment of $0.25 on ebay, and not breaking whole digit ceilings readily (e.g., bidding $99.99 rather than $100.01, $29.99 rather than $30, etc.), and that these tendencies lead bidders to converge at certain set points, generating duplicate maximum bid analysis from various bidders. Auctioneers tend to artificially supplant this with minimum increment rules but even then I have noticed a tendency to add 15% to the total and gravitate towards the bids that are readily divisible into the lot (e.g., bidding the increment closest to an even number per card, bidding to an increment closest to a per card average I would like to pay, etc.). Since I started analyzing pricing so intensely, I have noticed that the occasions where I have hit with my snipes at one increment more than the underbidder's max has greatly increased. Some of you probably know just what I mean; you can almost feel where the item is going to land.