I have since returned a few times to bid on some things, but have not purchased more bids. I have a few left, and in all likelihood, may never return to use them up.

After reading some other sites about Beezid, I began to watch the bidding “patterns”. I felt quite strongly, as others had commented, that there may well be ‘employed bidders’, who run the auctions up and occasionally “win” to entice others.

Long and short, I was very lucky and we’re enjoying the game. To anyone with a *hint* of lack of self-control over their spending/gambling, I urge you to “stay away” from these sites. There is much more at work than just patience and luck!

While they are not a complete scam because you sometimes get lucky, they are at best gambling and in a gray area legally.

The odds you’ll come out ahead are extremely low. We only considered building the site to make money fast, but the staff felt it was just too slimy a way to make money and we didn’t want to do it.

One guy one the team actually became addicted to one of the auction sites and lost his job because he failed to show up for three days in a row.

I can now cross that off my list of things to investigate…

It looks like this is how the site makes its money. For each auction, one person wins (and gets the item at a discount) and all the others either buy it for “retail” plus an inflated shipping fee (which is really a net loss for the customer) or leave the bids they used on the table (also a net loss).

It’s also worth emphasizing that Trent’s 15″ free” bids weren’t free at all – he paid 60 cents each for them just like he paid for his initial bid pack, since the listed “retail” cost of a $25 gift card plus 10 bids is $31.

They have it set up so that if you’re only bidding on gift cards like these, you have to leave some bids unused one way or another: Either you lose the auction and leave your bids on the table, or you win or buy at “retail,” and get some more bids that will go to waste unless you keep bidding on more auctions.

It’s a similar thing that I see on the bottom of receipts: “You saved $20 today!” No, I didn’t, because I wouldn’t have bought it at the original price. I really saved maybe $1 over buying it at the competitor’s store.

But here is a thought: the best “rational” response if your class is ever involved in a dollar auction is to bid a cent for the dollar. Then, someone else should bid two cents and the auction should end. This involves something called “superrationality”, first described by Douglas Hofstadter and currently dismissed by Wikipedia as “not a mainstream model within game theory” (hinc, as the Romans used to say, illae lacrimae).

The dollar will be shared equally among all participants (and non-participants) in the auction, first making sure that your fellow bidder gets her two cents back and you get your one cent before dividing the remaining $0.97 into equal shares of… well, 97 is regrettably a prime number, so a fight will break out no matter how many of you there were in the first place.

Still, at least the auctioneer will be out $0.97 and you will have beaten the system, which is after all the whole point. Or is it?