Chatted With Bill Goodwin Today

[Zach Wheat]

Originally Posted by oldjudge

With all due respect, I don't think a two or five minute rule works. The period is too short to allow people with a lot of bids to adjust them and heaven forbid they need to hit the bathroom too. I think the best solution is to close lots individually. Otherwise, if I were running an auction and I wanted all the lots to close at one time I would use a 15 minute rule, but I would say that the auction would end at some point between 1AM and 1:15AM EDT, regardless of the bidding. The end time in this period would be based on a predetermined time that only the auctioneer would know, and would be different for every auction. With this system you would avoid everyone trying to "snipe" at 12:59 because the auction might go to 1:15. However, because the auction would end at a random time between 1:00 and 1:15 it makes all bidders get their final bids in at some time around 1:00. Now, let's say the random end time that only the auctioneer knew was 1:04. At 1:00 and ten seconds bidders would notice that the auction had not ended. They could thus safely assume that they had until at least 1:01 to bid and thus could sneak in an extra bid if they wanted. This would repeat itself at 1:01 and ten seconds, at 1:02 and ten seconds and at 1:03 and ten seconds. However, at 1:04 it would end and anyone trying to be cute by holding off bidding would be closed out.

I have to agree here. I think a 2-5 minute rule would be difficult as would auctions ending individually. I can't imagine bidding on 10 itesm trying to track the ending time of each auction - or even having multiple screens up with the countdown timers showing.

Z Wheat