Ebay auctions are not real auctions, they are more like a game of poker. For example the best auction to bid on is one where no one else has bid. Then all lurkers will bid at the last minute and the high bid will win.
Also Ebay keeps the bidding "secret" until the auction is over. Actually the bidding is not secret, anyone can track an auction periodically and discover the current bid and time and person. Smart enough people can and probably do have software to do just this.
The best auction to bid on is one with no bids and you are the only lurker. Then AS assures you of the lowest win. If there are 2 lurkers, then you may get into a sniping contest. This is bad because one of you will have paid the highest price.
As to whether it is advisable to bid at all, that is an open question. One tactic which some bidders use is to place a high bid and then let proxy bidding bid the item up. This tends to scare off up other bidders. Once they have placed a bid however, they have revealed themselves and they are no longer a lurker. You would like to know how high their max bid is, so you can decide whether to over-ride it with a snipe. It is always possible to incrementally bid up the price to reveal the high bid. The disadvantage of doing this is that there is a 50% probability that you will end up being the high bidder. You never want to be the high bidder, because anyone can then snipe you; alternatively you may not want to be stuck with that high bid.
One technique is to bid up the price incrementally to a price you are comfortable with. Then if you revealed the high bid without becoming the high bidder you can decide whether to over-ride it with a snipe. This is a 50% crap shoot, but the odds are better than the slots.
If there are 2 or more bidders besides yourself, you should probably look for another auction. If there are 2 lurkers , one of you will get creamed. If there are 2 active bidders you will have to nibble at each of them to get their high bid. That leaves you with a 75% probability of ending up high bidder where you don't want to be. Of course you can always just post a snipe with your comfortable price. This usually ends up way low to the actual price if there are 2 or more bidders.
If there are mathenaticians among you Ebay offers an excellent example to study with continuous game theory. There are probably other strategies to the ones I have given above which give even better results.
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