How can sniping be stopped?
Sniping only works because bidders do not enter their highest bid in the eBay proxy bidding system. Under the proxy system, buyers only need to bid once on an auction and their bid will be increased incrementally whenever they are outbid, up to the price they enter. Snipe bids cannot succeed if another bidder has already entered a higher proxy bid – timing becomes irrelevant. The principle of snipe bidding can work in the real world too – if a buyer bids just as the auctioneer is about to close the sale this may catch the previous high bidder off-guard and win the auction. However, there is a very important difference: in the real world the auction will be extended to give others a chance to bid, which makes sniping more of an annoyance than a dependable tactic. If eBay extended auctions every time there was a bid within the last hour sniping would quickly die out. The downside is that sellers and buyers would not know when auctions will finally end.
