Originally Posted by BlueDevil63

I buy/sell a lot of stuff on Ebay. I used to use sniping programs but I no longer trust anyone with my Ebay credentials, period. My Ebay account is linked to my Paypal account is linked to my credit card/bank accounts. No way I trust some sniping service with those credentials.

I am currently watching about 50 items. There are some I really want. If they have no reserve price I put in my max bid and more or less sit back and watch. The Ebay proxy bid mechanism is more or less equivalent to sniping and is guaranteed to win if it has the high bid - the proxy service always gets the last bid no matter how close to the close your snipe comes in. The number of bids on an item has absolutely no impact on my decisions. I don't care who else is bidding or how many are bidding. If I want it I want it and I decide how much it is worth. Sometimes my desire increases or my research changes my opinion of the value of an item and I increase my max bid. I usually don't do this in response to being outbid but merely to make sure I won't be outbid below my estimated value by a last minute snipe. But yes sometimes I will be outbid early in the game and by the end of the auction decide I want it more (because I have lost other auctions at what I thought was a fair price or because I really want to finish a project or whatever) and will increase my bid, creating the behavior you describe. I'm far from a newbie but I don't approach every purchase as an emotionless automaton even though in some abstract sense that would be the best thing to do.