What is the reasoning behind... (in General)

waiting 23 hours and 45 minutes to determine if there is a internally set min bid on items spawned via the auctioneer.

Believe me I totally understand the economic reasons for min bids on items spawned via the auctioneer. Heck our government (US that is) pioneered the idea of keeping prices artificially high, and that system has been around for MANY years and it has worked well. So I have NO problem with a min bid, its the mystery behind it, that I cannot fathom the reasoning behind.

Because there _is_ no "internally set min bid."

CB only has a rough idea of what items are worth, so it always only places one bid, for the next-highest bid amount.

If CB immediately bid the max it was willing to pay you'd see people trying to find items for which CB would bid more than market value, which is not the point of this exercise. :)

If I get outbid on an item 12 hours before the auction finishes I tend to leave it be. But if I've only a short time until the finish I will bid again.

But 15 minutes is a very short window to catch it, especially if you had looked in at 20 minutes from the end. And on several occasions that gap has been even shorter. On a couple of occasions a bid from Central Bank has gone in during that space right at the end where you push the time back to 15 minutes. But the Central Bank bid hasn't activated that.

Ahhh ok, well that makes more sense. But to clarify, does that mean if after the Bank bids the next highest, then I over bid, will it over bid again or is it done?

Central Bank only bids if it considers the auction a bargain. Knowing that, it's *very* easy to avoid any last minute CB bids...

As Jon said, Central Bank will make only 1 bid.

also, I thought further about the "if it automatically bid the max" part, and wanted to ask, do you feel the same situation you described would occur if it was instead a min bid placed by the auctioneer, allowing no bids unless it met the min requirement?

obviously the potential for abuse wouldn't be there, just the potential for pricing mistakes, which is obnoxious in a different way

the reason I ask is, one of the chief arguments for artificially keeping prices high, is that the price be known.

Example: If I have a pair of CML's and I want to sell them. If I know for a fact, that from the "store" someone will have to pay at least 250K for them, then as a seller, I have very little pressure to sell below 250K unless I needed to make a quick sale, and even then, I will not reduce my price very much.

In this example the price being known will help keep all prices higher, not just the "stores" prices.

As it is now, a seller must look through all the expired auctions, then look though and see who won the auction, if it was allowed to sell at the price or if the system bid the price and bought the item itself.

This then creates a sort of ambiguity that would allow for greater pressure downward on my price to sell.

Again, I understand the reasoning behind the current system now, what I am now asking is, would a min bid set by auctioneer better than the current system at achieving what I believe to be the goal of keeping prices higher.

ahh yes, once again I do not consider the other end. How much of a pain it would be to constantly set and adjust min prices for all items that are sold via auctioneer.

Whatever CB bids is more or less known. See Stats->Items->Overview.