Kyoubai has one really annoying behavior that needs to be addressed: Can we please make it so that if “winning bid” < “reserve price” < “winning bidder’s maximum bid” we just set the current bid to the reserve price so the auction doesn’t fail? Every other proxy bidding system in the world works like this, or at least eBay certainly does, and it’s entirely reasonable to work like this since the winning bidder has already expressed a willingness to pay any amount up to his or her maximum bid in order to acquire the item in question, and the seller has already expressed an unwillingness to accept any less than the reserve.

It’s also troubling because, there are a lot of items (files mostly) on kyoubai that are very rare, but not very good. So the only people who are are really interested in them are collectors, of which there are comparatively few. So the problem is that if there’s a file which is really quite rare, so the seller sets a reserve of say 500,000   (entirely reasonable), I want the file so I will bid 1,000,000   except that if nobody else is willing to bid 500,000   or more, there’s no way for me to win the auction despite the fact that I’m more than willing to pay twice the reserve.

Further troubling is that if there’s a file with a reserve that only one person bids on, it’s impossible for that person to win the auction no matter how much they bid (this happened to me over the weekend, I bid 500,000   on a file that nobody else bid on, so the price never got above 338   so that I was rejected for not meeting the reserve. This is especially important to do as activity on Kyoubai dies down after the initial rush of it being new, and after people already get what they want and so stop bidding on those things.

So can we please just make this work like eBay where at the end if “max bid > reserve” set “current bid= reserve”?