| Completed Auctions Explained |
On the completed auctions pages, you will see something like this:
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Auction valued 15 bids ended Tue Nov 01, 12:06:24 PM. (began 11:55:25 AM) (15 Bidpack!) $1.54 - ldbaro (24) 0.901 (12:06:08.14) 0.006 $1.52 - susangerry5 (1) -0.138 (12:05:54.18) 0.009 $1.50 - ldbaro (23) 13.143 (12:05:39.90) 0.006 $1.48 - cjdaniel (15) -0.024 (12:05:38.07) 0.02 $1.46 - ldbaro (22) 0.458 (12:05:23.59) 0.006 $1.44 - augsurf (15) 10.952 (12:05:09.09) 0.041 $1.42 - cjdaniel (14) 1.828 (12:05:05.21) 0.007 ... $0.08 - aguirreolga4 (1) 11.974 (11:55:38.07) 0.007 $0.06 - cjdaniel (1) 4.979 (11:55:35.07) 0.006 $0.04 - augsurf (1) 6.972 (11:55:25.07) 0.006 $0.02 - justatry (1) 185.322 (11:52:26.72) 0.007 $0.00 - null (1) ? (11:45:35.09) 0.095 |
Here is an explanation of what you see:
| Auction header | |||
| Auction valued 15 bids | ended Tue Nov 01, 12:06:24 PM. | (began 11:55:25 AM) | (15 Bidpack!) |
| (1) Value of item in Bids, 1 Bid = $0.50 | (2) End time in PST 24-hour | (3) When clock first went below 20 sec | (4) Auctioned item |
| Each line beneath the auction header represents 1 placed bid | |||||
| $1.54 | ldbaro | (24) | 0.901 | (12:06:08.14) | 0.006 |
| (a) Price after Bid | (b) Bidder | (c) Bids placed by bidder | (d) seconds remaining when Bid | (e) time PST 24-hour when Bid | (f) accuracy of (d) |
Humans are highlighed yellow while robots are unhighlighted. In the example above, ldbaro won the auction for a "15 Bidpack" on Tue Nov 01, 12:06:24 pm PST. He placed 24 bids and then paid $1.54 . His last bid was placed when 0.901 seconds remained on the clock and his second to last when 13.143 seconds remained. After already spending bids equaling the value of the item, he had to spend more bids to compete with the robots susangerry5, cjdaniel, and augsurf. Because, once commited, it was better for him to pay 1.75 times the value of the item then pay the full price of the item and receive nothing.
Part (f) of a bid line is the one-sided tolerance of (d). In the above example (f) = 0.006 and (d) = 0.901. So, we know ldbaro's 24th bid was acknowledged when the clock had between 0.901 and 0.901 + 0.006 = 0.907 seconds remaining. This is because we asked ArrowOutlet "Who is winning?" and they said, "susangerry5". We then asked 0.006 seconds later and they said, "ldbaro". So, ldbaro's bid was acknowledged somewhere in that 0.006 second interval.
The negative acknowledgement times of the robots' bids you see above are not errors. As explained [here], our recording method is aware when an auction is actually ending to within plus or minus half a thousanth of a second. The robots' bids are either being accepted fractions of a second after the auction ends or the bid arrived exactly at zero seconds remaining and it took ArrowOutlet's server fractions of a second to acknowledge the bid. In our research, we have observed that it takes ArrowOutlet on average 0.01 seconds to process a new bid before sharing the information.
