10 May
2000
10 May
'00
2:16 p.m.
Please see my remarks embedded below.
Dick
----- Original Message -----
From: Carlos Murillo <cem14(a)cornell.edu>
To: <classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org>
Sent: Wednesday, May 10, 2000 11:50 AM
Subject: Re: Ebay Altair
<snip>
Hi, my name is Carlos and I am an eBayer :-) .
Hi, Carlos!
Of course, I've bought things that I probably shouldn't have
bought (I took risks). On the other hand, in teeny isolated Ithaca there
are no scrapyards and there is only one ham meeting a year (there is
another one close by, so that makes two hamfests a year).
My only source of free stuff is the ocassional find at the
dumpster in the EE department. And I am not going to cut short
what little family time I have on weekends in order to drive long
distances to more plentiful lands.
That's exactly where the value is added. You add value by hauling the stuff
home from the scap yard or sifting through the stuff in your friend's
driveway. It's like arguing that a diamond found on the ground is no more
valuable than the pebble nest to it. That's evaluating an item's worth on
the labor theory of value, like the communists tried to do for 75 years or
so with little success. If those on this list who embrace that theory would
just send me every $20 bill they find on the ground in the parking lot or
wherever, I'll happily send them one of the many $1 bills I've gotten that
way. Their value is the same, isn't it?
The remainder of Carlos' remarks deserve restatement:
Tim: sniping actually works. You just have to set your limit
beforehand. If the bids get past that limit, then don't snipe.
Bidding early does help bring the price up because others have
more time to convince themselves that they want the same thing.
Someone pointed out that this has more or less the effect of making the
auction mechanism more like a sealed bid auction, since snipers
often don't have the time to submit a second bid.
go
From an economic point of view, open bid auctions
are biased and
are not a good indicator of proper market value because the price
is not allowed to go down. In a rational market, repeated interaction,
equal visibility and access, and the fact that the price _is_ allowed to down as well as up is what makes it possible to find
the market
equilibrium.
Thus, not even the average price of many eBay auctions
is a good
indicator of market value, because all samples are biased. Somebody
already pointed out that eBay is good for sellers. Of course it is
good; the mechanism is biased in their favor.
Still, for reasons of local scarcity, I am glad that eBay exists.