Aspects of BiddingIntroductionThe 21st century has seen bidding auctions go online a great step towards making life in the business world faster and more efficient. One of the most reputable online based auctions of the day is the eBay site. Auctioning as is generally perceived refers to the provision of goods or services for sale and disposing them to the buyer with the highest bid. Online auctioning is equally competitive exhibiting various bidding behaviors some of which are hereby discussed.
Reputation biddingThis form of bidding behavior which is at times referred to as loyalty bidding is dependent on the relationship built between a potential seller, say a company, and a potential buyer. As is unlike the case in other behaviors former transactions play a major role in dictating the progress of a current transactions. The mind of customers is controlled by what they believe about the selling company, their loyalty to it and the treatment they may have or may have not received in former transactions. This auctioning behavior experience unpredictable trends with non-economic factors coming into play.
Bidding across competing auctionsThis minimum price bidding behavior involves a potential buyer bidding across a network of other competing auctions. Bidders submit their bids with the least standing and the highest bidder would then pose until is outbid by others. In this bidding behavior the prices of goods are highly sporadic with little predictability. The bidders are likely to be tempted to buy goods at much higher prices. Consider a situation in which there are four bidders and two auctions in competition. In case sellers’ values their products at 0€, while bidders’ values theirs at 4€, 5€, 9€, and 10€. Let each bidder select only one auction in which they bid their true valuation only once. There are chances that the highest bids fall in
1, 2 (1) or 3 of any of the bidders. The highest bidder’ will bid for more than the lowest bid by a certain amount. If 2 is below 1, 3 or 4, a bidder is deemed to be outbid by the highest bidder, and thus bidding will be cancelled. The bidding between the two bid is then closed. In the event that more than 2 bids fall within the limit on the bidders it is considered by the bidders that additional time spent bidding with them is lost. In such cases, they receive no bid back, thus the auction results become null, and the true value of their goods are set for them.
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How can this be avoided?
3 Bidgers and auction prices could be reduced in this way to the nearest 1€ or 2€. This, by making them auction time-delayed. It could also be, in any case, made explicit how the bidding is performed. A number of proposals, such as the ones discussed here, provide a way to give buyers and sellers the option of bidding through the full range of possibilities. Although such a proposal is not a suitable solution, it is a basic enough concept that many other approaches are already on the roadmap with similar effects on other applications of bidding.
4 The number of bid times for sellers and/or buyers would be similar. Even as bid times are much longer for buyers, those bids would be less indicative of prices. A new mechanism could be built to permit bids to be moved to a different auction to a lower or no auction. If this proposal is made a bit more explicit, bids would be transferred between auction time-delayed and bid-overhead auction time-delayed. This would enable bid-delayed bidding to be carried out at the cost of bid time. Thus in other applications it is easy to create a bid window which can be made to permit bidding to be carried out at higher or lower bids. The more successful the bid windows are, the more effective they can be to prevent bidding for goods from being canceled or withdrawn before they reach buyer’s hands. In this sense this could be the way of dealing with a high number of problems in a bid window, including the issue of the minimum bid. The first step in implementation would be to ensure that bid time-delayed can be delayed from any possible way to reduce or prevent the low bid. The idea here is to have only a bid window that is closed at any given time. Bidding might end up at auction time-delayed if the bid windows of the auction are closed. Alternatively, the auction time may be extended in some further way allowing bid time-delayed bid to remain in effect until the number of auctions is less than 100. Any new bidder could then bid only from the current maximum number. This scheme would be further discussed later with reference to alternative strategies for