As someone who ran auctions, I felt I had more responsibility to my consignors because I had a written contract with them. Bidders executed bids on their own. But it is a balancing act, and you need to keep everybody happy. In this case the consignors of course have no complaints, but the burden placed on bidders is great, and as we see from the posts, a lot of them are unhappy. A simple solution for bidders would be to leave a ceiling bid and forget about it, but too many simply don't trust leaving max bids. In the end the MEARS auction will probably attain some really great prices, but I'm sure they're thinking that they have to make some changes before the next one.
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