Heritage Auctions - Boston Garters

[Snowman]

Originally Posted by Peter_Spaeth

The last point is interesting. Is that because there are guys like Powell who just bid on the set side who otherwise would be pumping up the individual lots in an effort to win them all?

Yes, exactly. It doesn't benefit the consigner at all, in this case, to offer the set separately. It can only hurt them because all competitive set buyers would still bid their maximums in aggregate across the 12 lots, but they could get shut out if they only bid on one side and run out of competition on their side to keep them in the running with the other side.

In practice, it's more a convenience to set bidders than it is a bid maximization tool for the consigners, at least with a set this small where bidding both sides is easy to manage. If it were 1952 Topps, then ensuring you are the high bidder on each individual lot is much more challenging, and would result in most set bidders not wanting to bid that way. So offering both makes some sense there because it's very unlikely you're getting bidders to try to win every single lot otherwise. But in that case, you'd definitely want to allow set bidders to outbid the aggregate singles lots even if there is only one set bidder remaining. This allowance would make the "bid both sides" strategy pointless, and should have been implemented in this auction. But it wasn't. Hence the need to bid both sides.