Maybe this is a little off-topic, but this is something that I've never been able to figure out: in auctions where there's no buy-it-now (where bidding soon can remove the BIN option), why do people start bidding when there are days left in the auction?

It drives up the price, it gives other bidders a longer period of time in which to outbid you, and it alerts other bidders that this item must be something special. When you bid wouldn't make any difference if people actually put a set ceiling on how much they were going to bid--and then just bid that amount; but everybody changes their ceiling as they go, so early bidding pushes up other bidders' ceilings and thus increases the price.

The only valid reasons I can think of is that someone is going to be away from their computer for days and thus must bid now--or never; the other is that, if bidders don't show some interest, they're afraid the seller might just pull the item, but how often does an item get pulled just because it didn't get any bids for the first few days? The other reason, which I don't consider valid, is that the bidders just want to feel 'on-top' and thus they must outbid this other guy--RIGHT NOW. Besides that, I think it's just one of those things that's completely illogical, but many bidders never stop to think.

An excellent example is the Pedroia bat that Chris put up; I congratulate him on getting so much movement so quickly. I just don't understand why bidders do this: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...m=270378441696 . It's a 7-day auction and the price went from $9.99 to $460 in the first 15 hrs it was up for sale.

Maybe this has come up before on GUU, but I haven't seen it...