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Strategies & Market Trends : Anthony @ Equity Investigations, Dear Anthony, -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Instock who wrote (25763)	3/31/1999 12:13:00 PM
From: ACS_101	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 122087

MZON -- Yes. With 116 "Charter Merchants", MultZone appears to be groveling for crumbs on Amazon with a crowd of me-too's. Just speculating here, I wonder if/when the story will first break about web auction software generating shill bids to assure that nothing is ever purchased below the vendor's secret minimum. With such a flood of auction sites coming up, the main attraction is that you hope to find something you want, that nobody else notices to drive up the bid, so you get it cheap. Computers, of course, can fix that with shill bids. There's no way to verify that any given sale is to a "real" customer, is there? It reminds me of the 60 Minutes story of the computer slot machine programs used in Vegas that generate 100x the random number of jackpot "near misses" to fuel players' greed. This seems like an obvious "opportunity" to apply the same technology. The web auction promoters keep talking about the public's motivation as "entertainment", rather than greed for bargain prices. I doesn't seem that entertaining to me. If this ever comes to pass, the web auction market will deflate like a punctured balloon. The web auction space looked ugly last month in the wake of the Onsale debacle. Low margins, high overhead. What am I missing?