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I worked on a penny-bidding site. These guys "auctioned" items like PlayStation, tvs, cars to the user who placed the final bid on an item after 60 seconds of n
by beaker52 8y ago
I worked on a penny-bidding site. These guys "auctioned" items like PlayStation, tvs, cars to the user who placed the final bid on an item after 60 seconds of no further bids. Each bid would increase the final price by 1 pence/cent, but each bid would cost 50 pence/cents. You could "win" a $20,000 car for $500.37 and the house would have taken 50,037*50 cents. It might be okay if that was it -- but I was asked to code some "house bidders" who would outbid players until a certain threshold was met. I left that job shortly afterwards.
- AndrewKemendo 8y agoIs that even legal?
- thisone 8y agoPenny bidding, yes. Shill bidding, no.
- digianarchist 8y agoI worked on a system like that but it was run by a charity so whilst unethical at least somebody wasn't profiting from it.
- njarboe 8y agoI wonder what the percent of that unethical charity's income was spent on its stated mission? Many charities are just fronts for marketing companies with super high salaries and almost none of the money goes to what the donors would expect.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- lunulata 8y agoDitto, in my case the site was like this, wasn't itself a non-profit organization, but said proceeds from it would go to the specified NPOs... but that never actually happened as far as I know.
- pc86 8y agoIf it's unethical, it's unethical. Does it really matter if a company is profiting off of it or not?
- icedchai 8y agoYou missed out. You could’ve rigged it so you could easily win yourself.
- beagle3 8y agoI think it's more often referred to as a Dollar auction[0] - an example where a series of rational decisions leads to irrational behaviour. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_auction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_auction
- dmurray 8y agoThe dollar auction is usually run as an experiment in game theory classes and works a little differently from the penny auction sites. In the latter, all of your bids at any point are a sunk cost.
- beaker52 8y agoIt has many names. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bidding_fee_auction https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bidding_fee_auction
- beaker52 8y agoAnd I'm a brit. I did the math in cents for greater universality. Maybe a mistake after referring to a penny.
- ender89 8y agoI saw an ad for something like that a while ago, but realized that you couldn't sell an ipad for $0.56 if you weren't getting the full retail plus a margin from somewhere. Thankfully I never got into it.
- fastbeef 8y agoHow was this not regulated?
- scott-smith_us 8y agoSounds like Beezid. Worse than payday lenders IMO.
- Twirrim 8y agoA few years back I was house hunting with my wife. We found a lovely house that was a short sale, and put in a bid. Holy crap, that process was all kinds of frustrating and drawn out. About 3 months after we placed the offer, the bank put the house up for auction on another site, to try and drum up more offered. On the auction day, I checked in routinely no one was bidding. All was looking great. About three hours before closing, a bid came in that was lower than our offer. OK, still good. Then another about an hour later. Still good. Then the "final hour" of the auction happened and it slowly but surely started ticking upwards, bids started trickling in and the price started climbing higher and higher. About 20 minutes before the end it got past our offer and my heart sank. As the end time drew near it started getting bumped out by further offers. I told my wife we'd been outbid, after a stressful day, following on from months of stress and frustration. Next day, our realtor reaches out to the selling realtor who reported that the bank told her no one else had actually bid on the house. Yay.
- pc86 8y agoGood on you guys for not increasing your bid!