[ljd]

Trivial Pain (if that): I was watching Storage Wars last night and I couldn't help but wonder about bidding patterns.

The show has such a rich data set and their bidding strategies are so simple that I would love to see someone break down the metrics on that show. It's rare that someone has chronologically recorded all bets of all competitors and followed up on the asset value after the purchase.

Strangely, this reality TV show could be sitting on valuable information about how people bid and how to predict a successful auction.

[ebiester]

The problem is we only see a small subset of the bids. Any bids that the main characters aren't playing on won't be shown, will they? This will lead to selection bias.

[ljd]

This is a great point. I imagine whoever wanted to do the analysis would call Storage Wars and try to get them to work with you and give missing information such as that. It would be good PR for them to help out.

I'm mainly interested in how large the leaps are from competing bid to bid relative to the margin actually realized from liquidating the unit. My intuition says that the jumps will be larger on high margin units and they'll be more fine detailed when lower margin is present. Essentially, you're crowd sourcing the value of the unit.

While that may seem obvious, if this was proven to be true the best bets would be very small incremental jumps above the current high bid to signal low margin. If you did that you could convince the other bidder that you have information he doesn't have and since no one wants to be involved in a low margin liquidation the opposing bidder would have an incentive to bow out.

It's creating the allusion of information asymmetry.