Why do cards at auction sell for more?

[rhettyeakley]

There have been times in the past that I have kinda wanted a card and see it for sale via BIN and will make note of it that if there is nothing I want more I can always go back and buy the BIN I had my eye on. Sometimes that card will be relisted several times and it will remain on the "back burner" to me. Then the seller will decide he wants money and puts it up for auction and then I know it is now-or-never time and I end up bidding what the initial BIN price or slightly higher to get it. I almost always have some cards that people have for sale on my wish list but other purchases take priority.

[Brian Van Horn]

I have not read the other posts:

Why do cards at auction sell for more?

Adrenaline and greed overcome market value. If you get two guys who want something, the middleman, i.e. the auctioneer, profits.

Also, if you have one guy who really wants the card and the auctioneer knows it and is a little loose with shall we say ethics, the shill or phantom bidder comes into play.

To a large degree, the auction route is what the card market has been relying on for a while. Card shows and trading amongst collectors lag behind.

[Texxxx]

I think auction houses also have a tendency to get the people that are not collectors but are buying for investment. They don't know much about the cards and getting them from auction houses gives them a little more since of security that the cards they are buying are legit. The people that buy for investment are poor money managers to start with so paying to much does not click with them.

[Bored5000]

With regard to eBay auctions, I think a big reason is that searchers filter out BIN listings. There are so many BIN items that are vastly above market value that it often seems like a waste of time to plow through seemingly endless listings of people hoping to get 3-4 times what an item is worth.

For me personally, I usually filter out BINs because it is usually a waste of time to view the BINs.

[familytoad]

Why do items sell for more at auction?

I think its because in a fixed price , private sale , there is no underbidder.
In the auction, presumably the underbidder wanted to "win" too.

[Zach Wheat]

Originally Posted by Bored5000

With regard to eBay auctions, I think a big reason is that searchers filter out BIN listings. There are so many BIN items that are vastly above market value that it often seems like a waste of time to plow through seemingly endless listings of people hoping to get 3-4 times what an item is worth.

For me personally, I usually filter out BINs because it is usually a waste of time to view the BINs.

Agree with this poster. I don't have a lot of time and generally filter out BINs. Once in a while I will go back and sort through all of the listings but with the changes finding what I want is more difficult.

[frankbmd]

In the fixed price or private sale the market value is determined by the fixed price or seller. Sellers cannot be trusted. (Axiom #1)

In the auction setting the market value or winning bid is determined by the idiot who bid a few dollars less than the winner. (Axiom #2)

I would suggest that the "deal" is a competition between the buyer and the seller , and not a competition between buyers.

In the first "fixed price" scenario, the outcome can be modified by what is commonly known as dickering. Some sellers will dicker, some buyers will dicker, but not all of either group are willing to dicker. Hence the need arises for the auction scenario to accommodate a deal between at least one non-dickering participant.

In the second "auction" scenario, the dickering seller and the non-dickering seller are all eliminated from the equation. The dickering buyer cannot dicker with a non-dickering seller. Therefore buyers, both dickering and non-dickering, rely on the infinite wisdom of the previous idiot whose bid they raised, to reassure themselves that if they are not paying too much, because someone else, the prior bidder, was more than willing to pay almost as much and he must know more than seller. This of course can lead to unjustified inflation of sales prices.

I see the so-called bidding war as the validation of market value independent of the evil seller, who relinquishes all control of the process in this format, whether he is willing to dicker or not.

This argument does not invalidate any impact of supply and demand on the ultimate sales price.

So that's pretty much the answer in a nutshell. If you have any questions, don't ask.