Nibble bidding

[bombbloke]

A silly little question which has been asked before - I might've even known the answer once, but I don't now and can't find a thread with the answer - and it's going to be stuck in my head until I can get some sort of plausible explanation for it.

Usually I seagull auctions (or snipe them, choose your term). Yesterday, feeling lazy from too many BINs recently, I decided to place a bid on an item about 24 hours before it ended.

Anyway, the auction finishes up and I lose. No big deal. But the bidding history confuses me; there were only two other bidders, and they were both nibblers, submitting nearly thirty bids between them. Over twenty of these came from one of the pair over the course of about an hour and a half - he never passed my maximum, the other nibbler achieved that.

Now, I don't for a moment suspect shilling, as the seller's account isn't suspicious in any way. Normally I'd assume that the bidders don't understand autobidding, but... the guy who put in the bulk of the bids had a feedback score of 888 (more than double my own).

So on to my question - is there any possible benefit from bidding a buck at a time, as opposed to just dropping in the max figure you're willing to pay? Even if it's just to mess with people's heads?!

[wilk1149]

I've been getting $600 a year out of Telstra for at least eight years now. In regards to bidding I'm a big sniper. When I first started buying on eBay I had to use an account of
one of the boarders at the boarding school I
worked at as I had no credit card and only credit card holders could have an eBay account back then. In those days the competition for the items I wanted was a lot less. I could just place a $150 bid and I never lost. Well I lost one auction a bloke from Scotland out bid me on a Brock car but our dollar was worth very little then and he wo
n it for about £62. Still spewing about that, it was in excellent nick and I would have paid more. I think that loss educated me about what I then called end of auction bidding as he had bid more every day until he won. I realized that the more you think about it the more you decide you will pay, therefore if they can't rethink their bid the higher the chance of winning and hence the lower the price you pay. Been a sniper since then. I don't use one of the sniping services, actually didn't know they even existed until recently. Live by the belief that if you want something done right do it yourself. Sometimes I put in an early bid so the item is in my buying list instead of cluttering up my watch list. Sometimes I just can't help myself and will chuck in a bit or two because I like seeing myself as the highest bidder or I'm interested in how much the other bidders have valued the item. Might have to do with which half of my brain is doing the thinking at the time