25 Apr
2003
25 Apr
'03
9:19 a.m.
Preface:
I come at this from a slightly different viewpoint. My father was a
manufacturer, as well as distributor of other firms' product. I
literally grew up wheeling and dealing, and learning through loss of my
allowance the difference between cost, value, and the expenses that lie
between.
My mother is a professor of business economics at a business college,
and teaches at a nuts & bolts level. What's different is that they
were also missionaries in Uganda and Kenya for several months each year
while Mother was taking her Master's, and she used the Ugandan economy
and the concept of "relative regional valuation" in her thesis. I
absorbed a good bit of that, although not at any deep level.
I've found eBay to be a very compressed, very accelerated microcosmic
example of not only my mother's observations, but of general business
principles of valuation and distribution.
To quote the, uhm, well, anyway, to quote Richard Erlacher,
"See below, plz."
On Friday, April 25, 2003, at 02:14 PM, Vintage Computer Festival wrote:
To you as buyer or to you as seller? As buyer, absolutely. If the
thing was worth more than $10 to me as a buyer, and they had been
selling at $10, I'd have already sated myself on $11 Apple //e's, so
that spike would be irrelevant. :)
As seller, it's more complicated. The answer would be "No, but yes."
If I put an Apple //e on the newsgroup at a fixed price, I'd look at
the low side of this config and condition, as indicated by eBay and any
other references I can find to actual sales, add 25-50%, and settle for
the best offer. If I have 100 //e's and I put them up at a Dutch
auction, I would have to expect $8 or $9 each at best. Auctioned as a
single lot, maybe $2 each or even less. If I have 100 units and I
auction them singly, well presented, records of high price spikes would
either be rare enough to not affect the average sale, or common enough
to indicate that I may benefit from that mania.
Sure. Its "value" was simply more widely acknowledged.
Doc
On Fri, 25 Apr 2003, Doc Shipley wrote:
Here I think you're not recognizing the difference between value and
cost. To mix our examples, the real _cost_ of a VAXstation 3100 in
Austin - to me - is, say, $1 USD. To someone in Melbourne, I'm
guessing the cost is much closer to $100 USD. Since I know there are
persons in Australia who would like to have one, and they haven't
contacted me to inquire about shipping arrangements, I can safely
assume that the real _value_ in Australia doesn't approach the real
_cost_.
That's the condition of regional scarcity to which I referred. While
my example isn't extreme enough to warrant shipping a container of
VAXen, it does imply, rightly I think, that the Australian owner of a
VAXstation 3100 could expect a selling price many times higher than I
could expect.
Regional and *perceived* scarcity are much
more relevant factors to
real current value than some assigned global scarcity. A good example
is the plight of the DEC collectors in Australia and New Zealand, who
would commit unnnatural acts for a working VAX. Meanwhile, I have a
stack of them in storage, besides the several I use at home. I would
drive across town to rescue another VS3100, but I doubt that I'd pay
cash for one.
Wasn't someone just arguing in a message a short while ago that eBay
has
now opened up a global market and therefore increased demand to the
same
finite supply? Of course, this depends on whether or not you use eBay
to
market your wares. And then there's the issue of shipping charges,
which
adds to the overall "value" that a person will assign to something.
If it
can be had for $1 but costs $99 to ship, it could be considered to be
worth just as much as someone who could pick it up locally and would be
willing to pay $100. This assumes that the buyer is taking shipping
into
consideration when they put down their bid.
But regional scarcity implies ignorance on the part of the buyer. You
cannot always rely on this. And in a global market like collectable
computers, you cannot completely rely on this anymore. Understand
that I'm not nit-picking. I'm trying to demonstrate
that
the "artificial" influences on eBay, realtime auctions, the feeding
frenzies I've seen at swap meets -- they are _valid_ factors in the
value of any product, and doubly so with collectibles.
I can't entirely agree. I'll pull up an old example. If people are
regularly paying $10 for Apple //e's and then some uninformed buyer one
day pays $500, are all Apple //e's suddenly worth $500? or some
significant amount over $10 that is arrived at by averaging in the $500
sale?
I say no, it's still only worth $10. My
PDP-11/53's "true" "objective" value would have to be nil.
There's
nothing it can do that can't be done more efficiently by a later
PDP-11, and nothing *I* do with it that I couldn't do in SIMH, much
faster and at a much lower real expense. Its value is *entirely*
emotional, and entirely subjective.
Then what was it worth when it was new? Wasn't the "value" then also
entirely emotional and subjective?