3.99 vase sells for $100,000

[raulus]

Originally Posted by Exhibitman

He sounds like a smart professional who took a risk, and it paid off. Hell, the experts he consulted had views that put the value of the mask in line with what he paid for it, and it was only after a lot more homework and testing that he got a crazy good outcome.

More to the point, philosophically speaking, even assuming that the dealer knew he was looking at a very valuable object, I do not think he had a duty to tell the sellers anything. Anyone with expertise has probably worked his butt off to get to that level of knowledge and has a right, in our hyper-capitalist society, to use it to profit. Nor do I think people with equal bargaining power (not knowledge, bargaining power) have anything to bitch about when the counterparty has superior knowledge and uses it to advantage. An expert has no reason to give up that advantage in an arms' length transaction. I heard about a similar situation over the weekend, $25 item morphing into a $50K item when a smart buyer figured it out. I am jealous but not critical. My only complaint is that I wasn't the one who found the golden ticket.

The vase deal is the mirror of that situation: the professional was blind without a cane and the buyer was canny.

Yeah. My recollection is that the bigger argument was the ethics of getting a deal that's too good. Based on the discussion, for some of the posters, buying a million dollar piece for $100 constitutes a moral failing on the part of the purchaser.

Of course, we also had lots of exciting hypotheticals, and some pushing to attempt to figure out where the ethicists draw the line between getting a good deal and acting unethically. I even shared somewhat of a similar situation where I recently purchased an item for somewhere between 1% and 10% of its value, and the overwhelming response was basically that I got a good deal, and shouldn't worry about it.

My recollection is that the potential for bad karma was also a factor.