I fail to see how my electing not to bid against my CR friends and acquaintances could be considered collusion. I know that there are some CR members that recognize my eBay ID and are very unlikely to bid against me but I have no idea what auction items that may apply to nor whether they have a pressing need for it and might suspend their general practice.
If I want an item, I place a small bid below my true threshold and then back it with an esnipe bid. Maybe there are some of my friends out there that would notice and decide not to compete for it. As others have pointed out, during this version of the roughly semi-annual rehashing on the CR list of how eBay auctions work, the structure of the system makes sniping the only sensible way to participate.
I invite the DOJ to come after me for gentlemanly conduct in a rather tawdry marketplace.
Charlie "ctycyle on eBay" Young
Honey Brook, PA
USA
today'sreally bad idea.
> John Betamis wrote that we should organize and all agree to not
> competitively bid against other bidders who are on this list. Speaking of
> eBay "ethics", The US Department of Justice has a name for this:
> Collusion
> in restraint of free trade, and it is a felony.
>
> Ed Feinberg
> Newton MA
> (I'm not an attorney but I've raised several of them)
>
>
>
> John Betamis wrote:
>
> While on this subject, I have to bring up another angle; that of bidding
> against someone you know on this list.
>
> For the last few months I have been looking for a Simplex Tour de France
> type rear changer for the Claud Butler I plan to build up. Every time I
> saw
> one come up on eBay I watched it to see if I could snag it for $50-$60.
> That seems like a reasonable sum to me since these were very popular in
> the
> 1950s and many thousands would have been made. Invariably, however, I saw
> the price shoot up well over my ceiling, sometimes double that. On three
> occasions, if I recall, I saw our own John Crump bidding on one of these.
> In one case I was also bidding and felt really bad in case I drove the
> price up and then had to drop out when I could no longer afford it and Mr.
> Crump would end up paying more than he would have otherwise. As it turned
> out, we were both outbid by a big margin. I finally did get my derailleur
> a
> few days ago at a price I was willing to pay (although it's a 4-speed
> rather than the 5-speed I really wanted) and I even outbid a buyer from
> Japan. Mr. Crump was not bidding. Maybe he'd been so discouraged in
> previous auctions, he'd just given up. Anyway, maybe this has been brought
> up before, but it sure would be useful to have a database of CR list
> members' eBay handles so we don't end up bidding against each other on
> items that regularly come up. There's lots of vintage stuff out there and
> if you don't get what you want today, you'll get it a month from now.
>
> John Betmanis
> Woodstock, Ontario
> Canada