Can't fight City Hall- eBay protecting their large sellers (probstein content)

[Exhibitman]

Originally Posted by VoodooChild

I'm not saying that I condone it, but what are we supposed to do when the market value of the cards we want are set by shilled ebay auctions? We can boycott certain ebay sellers and ebay itself, but what about respected auction houses and the BST here? Aren't the "market value" prices we pay there also determined by shilled sales?

It isn't easy to fix this mess, no one said we could wave a magic wand and make it so. However, a good start is to acknowledge the problem and refuse to be part of it rather than just throwing up your hands and surrendering. I used to think that I was smart enough to simply snipe my price and that would be OK, but since reading more about what happened with Mastro and what is happening on eBay I realized that it is causing real damage. When I see a probstein auction now I don't bid. Simple enough. If enough people refuse to patronize probstein auctions, they will close. It all starts with personal accountability.

The way people use 'market price' bugs me. People act like there is an entity called 'market' who sets a price like a giant grocery clerk with a tagging gun, and then we have to abide by Market's price on the tag. That is just magical thinking. A card is worth whatever a willing buyer and seller are willing to transact for it at a given time, and that number is subject to indefinite variables that are never quite the same, whether it is someone filling out a set, someone with a big consignment offset available, etc. The 'market price' construct bothers me because if the last sale on the card was $100 but there are no cards available for $100, then the market price for the card isn't $100.

My comment on price distortions dovetails with the market price construct issue: because people insist on creating a 'market price' to rely on, the inflated sales results become the raw data from which people who like to follow the herd will distill their 'market price'. I have been assembling data on boxing cards for my guides for over a decade. I gather data from various sources: eBay, auctioneers, private sales I become aware of, etc. If some of those reported outcomes are skewed by illegal activities like shilling then I end up reporting inaccurate information, and the people who rely on that data to create their price points will be relying on unrealistic data. Uncertainty kills commerce. Unreliable price data generates uncertainty in the sense that collectors see a card selling for $100 and wonder why they can't sell theirs for $90, or they wonder why even though no one has stepped up to pay $90 for the card no seller will take $75 for it.

I have decided that until the python passes the puppy, so to speak--until I feel realistic steps have been taken to stem the tide of shilling and market manipulation--I am not going to offer price research again.