Group Buy - Dutch Auction Idea

[Trogdor]

All:

I e-mailed this idea to Gennadiy, who told me I should put it here for discussion:

I wanted to mention an idea that I just had: If you were to start a group buy of a highly desirable chip with a very limited quantity, do you think you would ever consider having a mini-dutch auction, where each person would tell you how much they would be willing to pay for the chip, and at the end, the people with the highest bids would win the privilege of participating in the group buy? This would not be adaquate for most group buys, and would be difficult to implement well, but I think it might work in easing the "first-come-first-serve" constraints of normal group buys with limited quantities (such as the "Group buy: Intel 80c187-12 FPU"). Maybe this is a bad idea - let me know.

(Edit 1: Edited from "Normal" to "Sticky")
(Edit 2: Edited back to "Normal" (What's the difference?))

[gshv]

This is a good idea, although it may require some tweaking It'd be nice to see what other people think about it.

[anheier]

I might suggest limiting the number of group buy chips for each person to only one each for a period of one or two days. Then if there are any chips left after that, allow individuals to bid on multiples. This wouldn't solve the problem when there are only 3 chips, but would help when there are say 10. Of course this puts more management on to Gennadiy, which might not be fair. The dutch auction sounds interesting, but there may be problems with sniping and price inflation as per ebay.

Just my 2-cents...
Norm

[gshv]