[quote name='thejam']
I have this idea of the "lightning lowball" that completely turns the auction thing around and gives a huge incentive to bidding early, right after the auction opens. The advantage of bidding early is so big that you actually should advertise before the auction starts to give everyone fair warning. To make it simple to explain, I'll exaggerate the effect and make the minimum bid increment 100% (each bid must be double the previous bid), with $1 minimum. Here goes.
Take item X (Vesperia special edition, say). First bid is $1. Then $2, $4, $8, $16, $32, and then $64. But the next guy would have to pay $128, which is probably too steep. So the FIRST guy to get to $64 has a huge advantage over everyone else, since the next allowable price after that is such a huge jump that it acts as a deterrent to any other bids. It's a kind of race to get to that $64, so people may try to skip those lower bids to get right to that top $64 bid. That's why I call it a lightning lowball, since you have to bid quickly.
I haven't seen this done yet. Maybe no one else thought of it, which I doubt. The big problem is that sellers may think they have to accept a final price less than what the market would otherwise bear. Suppose the true price is $110. Then (almost) no one will pay the $128, but many would pay $64. So the seller may think they're losing $110-64 = $46 due to the big increments.
Of course you don't have to make the bid increments 100%. You could make them 50% or 25%. Maybe make the increments large for cheap items and ramp it down as the price goes up, e.g., 100% below $10, 50% between $10 & $20, 25% for $20+. Using these manipulations, you can trade off the sniping disincentive from the perceived seller loss.
I say perceived here because it may bring in more bidders and be much more exciting to have an auction where you don't have to snipe just to act in your own interest. It becomes worthwhile to watch the auction earlier because you don't want to miss the right increment. Big increments (maybe only 25%) act as a discount for the buyer who wins, so, like every sale, there's an incentive to showing up early. So with more excitement we get more bidders and therefore more sales and revenue.
The need to constantly "bump" your lowball thread will be reduced because all those extra bids will be like bumps. Think of it this way: if all those sniper bids at the end could be distributed throughout the auction time... they're like free bumps. Plus there are bid bumps from people wanting to take advantage of the increment sale effect.[/QUOTE]
The biggest issue with the above method is that, while it may be exciting, it is also confusing. Maybe not to you, maybe not to me, but go ahead and enter any lowball and see how many people have trouble even sticking to simple bidding rules such as "only bid in $1 increments" "please do not edit bids" "do not post bids in spoilers" and then the typical "Hey, how does this work?" posts.
I am nearly 100% positive that if you went post by post through every lowball thread in any given week, that you will find all of these issues.
As for the constantly bumping the lowball thread thing. Personally, I only answer questions after it has started. When people consistently post updated to here, updated to here, thanks for your bid, added, edited the op, updated to here... I cringe.
IMO, if you have to do that to keep your thread up, your lowball is too long. I never recommend over a week (Ultimate Lowballs are an exception at 10 days, but that was also 1000+ items each time with three phases ending over three days) and typically go for 5 days if I can.
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