Auctions - why bid early?

The times that I will bid early is only to clear out the non serious bidders - I want to get it over a certain amount to test the waters and see who stays in the game. Kinda like poker, I guess, huh?
I then sit back and wait. I usually will not enter my final bid until the end and hope my proxy kicks butt. I have been beat too many time when bidding too early.

megasam, why would red flags go up? I have relisted items when my reserve price was not met. Is that what you mean?

-aj

There is a reason no one else has mentioned. When an item is obviously being auction by a private individual (Not an antique dealer) and is extremely under it's value I'll place a bid just to keep a dealer from taking advantage of the uninformed. A good example would be someone selling their Dad's collection, or stereo after he has passed on.

I have bought and sold on both formats and a few others. The only thing I have learned is you cannot predict what will happen.Sometimes everyone wants it or no one.
I have sold stuff that didn't work (for parts ect.) and got 2 or 3 times what I expected.Put up great items ( to me anyway ) that didn't get much responce or bidding.
Sold stuff in 5 min.after posting and posted items 5 times to sell.
Buying has gone the same.
If I ever figure out when and how to bid and when and how to sell...LOOK OUT B. G. !!!

I sometimes will bid early just to track and or watch something i'm interested in, e-bay use to have a 20 item max. that you could watch, i think it's now 30, but you can bid early or low and watch as many as you want. A $10.00 bid on a $1000-2000 item hardly brings the total up.

Angela, yes there can be legitimate reasons why same item is auctioned more than once by same seller as you just described. I am just wondering out loud about my description above where friend "could" bid up item to raise proxy bids, and then if he went too far and was high bid not buy the item. Seller would then have to auction again later.

That might be a nice feature to have at Audiogon, an auction history so buyer could see previous results if same item was auctioned before, and draw his own conclusions.

The scenario I describe hopefully rarely if ever happens at Audiogon auctions, especially if seller has great feedback history. Don't want to get too off track here from original question about when to place your bid.