Do you reward timing on the AH?

| Friday, March 1, 2013
By timing I mean whoever posted most recently.  The reward is getting the sale rather than the later person.  While this is not a black and white concept, I think it can be distinguished from offering a significantly lower price.

For example, person A posts a frostweave bag for 225g.  Person B shows up sometime later and posts a frostweave bag for 224.9599g.  The one copper only has the effect of changing the sorting, without any significant savings to the buyer.

Contrast this with person A posting for 225g and later person B posts for 215g.  10g isn't exactly a game-changing savings, being maybe half a daily quest of gold, but it is not trivial either.  You'd care about 10g but not a value 1/100,000 as large.

Is 1g a significant undercut?  What about 50g, but on a 1500g item?  I acknowledge that this is subjective and relative.  Yet I would still call it real, in the sense that I notice it in both my own behavior and that of other people.  I've bought the item that is 1c more because I think it is ridiculous to reward timing rather than actual savings.  Similarly, when I've seen my items undercut by trivial amounts, they have still sold, yet the competing items remain.  I cannot attribute this to other sorting methods such as time remaining, since items of higher price often bracket my own.

The most incident that inspired this post was the frostweave bags.  I had several up for 225g.  Seeing that they had sold, I went to post more, only to find that there is a bag posted at 219.375g.  The 6g difference in price was ignored for some reason.  Both were very long auctions.  The next highest bags were at a 238g buyout, so the 13g gap there was apparently large enough to discourage moving up further in the price.

Alternatively, someone misread prices and I am reading way too much into this.

3 comments:

Kring said...

That's why you undercut and overcut at the same time. Luckily most people post for strange numbers which allow you to overcut for 1 copper and it looks like the other one undercut you for 1 copper. :)

And more serious, that's why I never cancel my auctions but only add additional ones at an undercut price.

Dàchéng said...

Kring, that's a marvellous trick!

Klepsacovic said...

That's some Evil League of Evil material right there.

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