18 May
2005
18 May
'05
3:03 p.m.
Some info about sniping, from an eBay employee...
If ebay wanted to take advantage of the sniping
phenomenon correctly,
they would figure out a mechanism to bring it into their system, or
...
Yes, they could. I was told (about 3 years ago) that they developed
the code to do it, but never enabled it.
Last week, an eBay employee told me something about such
anti-sniping proposals: they put eBay closer to the auctioneer
position, which they DO NOT want to be in. (There are rules/laws
governing auctioneers, apparently, which they don't fit.)
His claim was that by auto-extending an auction, it becomes the
kind of auction subject to those rules. By simply having a
hard cutoff based on the clock, they're avoiding that problem.
It sounded plausible.
Stan
--
Stan Sieler
sieler at allegro.com
www.allegro.com/sieler/wanted/index.html