Quote Originally Posted by bwalker36 View Post
Edit: Also whats up with the hostility here. It's like you guys have a personal stake in this lol.
Cuz Bizzybeast for some reason likes to troll every market-related thread with his condescending yet at the same time confused, meaningless, and mostly irrelevant rhetoric. It's pretty aggravating that not only does he not seem to grasp basic economic principles, but he turns around and tries to force his own twisted understand of how the economy should work on you. Of course if you point out obvious flaws with his views it's because you are clearly the equivalent of a small child or exceptionally intelligent goldfish and as such simply don't understand his grand vision, and if he just explains it to you one more time you'll realize your mistake. *eyeroll*

I'll stop here as I see Kazamoto has written the rest for me. Back to the issue at hand, yes rampant undercutting is an issue at the moment, but I don't think blind auction is the way to fix it; it would simply make the market even more inefficient than it already is. Obscuring the price of listings doesn't help an item reach its true price as dictated by supply and demand, rather it does the opposite and stagnates the price by keeping it at the level it has been selling historically. This makes the price slow to react to changes in supply and demand because people can only able to see the historical prices and don't have enough information to determine if the item would sell at a different price point, so the only thing they can do is bid/list at the price it's always sold at.

The real solution is to have a two-sided exchange just like in any real life market. Sellers place ask orders at the price they would like to sell at, and buyers place bid orders at the price they're interested in buying at. This makes the state of the supply and demand very apparent and the price quickly and easily converges to the "true" value. This completely removes the issue of undercutting because you can only undercut so much before you're at the bid wall, and you won't be "driving the price into the toilet" as has been said of current undercutting practices because that'll be the actual price people are interested in buying the item at.

Also an oft-cited reason for undercutting is that some sellers want to make quick sales, and with an exchange like this they can instantly sell their goods by filling an order on the bid side without moving the price on the ask side at all, removing the need for other sellers to constantly adjust their prices. This is part of why the price of the item will converge quickly to the true price and stay react fluidly to changes in supply and demand, because the supply can move to meet the demand and vice versa.

Of course, quick convergence to the true price may not please some of the people seeking market reform as their issue is mainly that things they were able to sell at high prices previously are now priced much lower due to changes in supply and demand, especially as I believe many things on the market are currently overpriced by two or three fold. However I think this will be healthier for the economy in the long run enabling fast and efficient trading at prices close to items' true worth, compared to the sorry situation we have now where buyers are either paying exorbitant prices or can't buy the item they want because they have no other way of influencing prices downwards, and sellers can't get their items to sell without constant and aggressive undercutting because all they can do to facilitate a transaction is hope they happen to have the lowest priced listing when a buyer commits to buy.