quote:An excellent experiment a try. 39 seconds might seem like a lifetime, but it’s a nerve racking one (at least for me). You’re watching the auction getting ready to place your manual snipe. You have the bid history in one window and your snipe ready in another window (obviously you are already signed-on). You’re refreshing the bid history like crazy keeping an eye on the bid amount and number of bids and the remaining seconds. You see someone place a snipe 39 seconds before closing. What do you do? Snipe early afraid the other guy will retaliate, or wait and be afraid your snipe won’t be high enough? (QUICK! The atomic clock is ticking.). Do you snipe you’re original amount, or try to change it? If you don’t change it, then your snipe doesn’t make any difference to the “premature” (39-seconds) sniper. If you change it you have to decide how much you are going to snipe (QUICK! The atomic clock is ticking.). Enter the snipe amount (be sure to have a window available for bidding, and be sure you click on the right window – oops wrong window). Verify the new snipe amount (QUICK! The atomic clock is ticking.) You don’t want to enter 1199 instead of 119.90. Click on “Continue”. Wait. Confirm your bid. Find the damn “Submit” button, and then click on it. Wait for your bid to be registered by ebay. Are you high bidder or no? If no, hope you have time to repeat the entire process (QUICK! The atomic clock is ticking). Remember, you haven’t had a lot of time (only a few seconds) to think about how much more you are willing to spend. You might go nuclear in the frenzy, but you might just nibble-snipe your way. All the time you are doing this you are missing Survivors. But, if you don’t have a stroke, you’ll feel *like* a survivor. That scenario may just be what the other guys were going thru, assuming that they retaliated to your 39 second snipe.
Experiment: Try placing a bid at 39 seconds from the end. Not easy!
The conclusion I came to? It’s very hard to place retaliatory snipes – but that may just be me.