[yoak]

To do this right, you have to be able to change the terms of the auction. Allow bidding for the $1 to start at a penny so it seems like a good deal. Then allow that the highest bidder gets the dollar, but doesn't have to pay... and the second-highest bidder must pay his bid amount, but receives nothing.

You should see dollar bills purchased for hundreds of dollars at least.

"The only way to win is not to play the game." </wargames>

[BoppreH]

There's a very strange Brazilian auction site called "Pior Lance" ("worst bid", found at http://www.piorlance.com.br/ ).

The name is misleading, it actually works this way:

1) You buy "bids", the right to do a single bid 2) Every auction has a timer that ends the auction when reaches zero 3) Every bid placed on an item increases it's price by 1 cent and resets the timer

Products get auctioned for values below 20 bucks, which may seem like a great deal, but every cent costed one buck from the bidder.

Pure genius.

[jerf]

There are a ton of these. Here is one of several times HN has talked about them: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=700143

Actually, "site:news.ycombinator.com swoopo" goes on for a while on Google, and that's just one such site...

Edit: Ah, and from http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=978097 we get http://www.pennyauctiontraffic.com/ . Yow.

[tomjen3]

Ah the dollar action. The evil part of me wants to launch an online auktion house that runs all its actions that way.

The lazy part of me figure it is too much work.

[yoak]

Yeah, the busy part of me has too many other things to do as well, but if you need someone to feed you dozens of other ways to use game theory to abuse people, it'd be worth it just for all the headdesk in seeing them implemented.