[Coco] Re: Barden's Assem book

[John R. Hogerhuis]

[OT - ebay stuff]

I've been playing with Ebay for a little while now, bought and sold some
things. Here are my lessons learned:

I *always* snipe auctions. Here's why: bidding high, early encourages
bidding wars. Although your bid is secret there is a way for the other
person to find out what your bid is: by outbidding you. And when the
other person does that, he only has to beat your bid by like $.50
usually. So by putting in your max bid some jackass could beat yours by
$.50 and you lose the auction. What's the point of that? Of course you
would pay $.50 more. But if you bid $.50 more the other person will just
bid past by another $.50

Sometimes I bid early, but at maybe half my actual target price. This is
just to find out if anyone out there will take the bait and bid against
me. That way I can gauge whether this item is popular or not, whether I
can get it cheap.

Bidding is a game of incomplete infomation in the mathematical sense...
your goal as a buyer is simple: get what you want for the lowest
possible price. I don't think sniping is really an effort to "lowball."
When I snipe an item I snipe at what I'm willing to pay, since there is
no opportunity to up the bid afterwards. I just don't like getting
involved in stupid bidding wars which inflate the price beyond anything
reasonable. If you watch Model 100's sell on Ebay, some days you'll see
an M100 go for $15 to $25. The next day nearly the same item will go for
$60. The reason? Bidding wars (OK, well bidding wars and random chance
as to what kind of rubes are looking at auctions Today...). They're good
for the sellers, but always bad for the buyers.

I win most auctions in the last 9 seconds using bidwatcher (Free,
GPLed). Some auctions I'll put in the minimum bid just so the seller
can't delist the item or change the ad as easily. But then someone will
outbid me... then you won't see my name again until the auction is
closed :-) . 

You're right about reserve prices. For sellers moving items that they
are sure will sell, the best way from perspective of ebay fees is to
start bidding at $.01 and no reserve. It's a bit risky though for many
items.

Personally I think if I wanted Barden's coco assem book (I have it
already) $4 ain't bad for an out of print work like this. I recently
acquired the book "Thinking Forth" for a conversion to PDF project (with
the author's permission)... it cost me $60, for an out of print work on
a relatively rarely used language, with examples in a dead form of the
language. But it is rare, still sought after so the price is high. And I
see used copies on Amazon going for > $80.

-- John.