Auction rules

• The auction puts up an item indicating its real retail price. Participants have to buy bids for a fixed price defined by the auction owner. It guarantees the owner’s profit even in cases when items worth thousands of dollars are won by very low bids of far less than their value.
• The participant’s main purpose is to make a bid which will be both the lowest (or highest) and unmatched. If the bid for such an amount has already been made by another participant, both bids are considered invalid. Among all unique bids the lowest (or highest) bid is the winner.
• Auction participants don’t see other participants’ bids. They see the leader but don’t know the leading bid. However, participants may see a special panel which keeps track of their personal bids. In Merkeleon solution, invalid bids are highlighted red and the potentially winning bids are highlighted green.
• The auction administrator sets the price level, by which bids shall be divisible, and the closing time.
• If no bid appears to be unique until closing time, which is a very rare, the item is not sold.
  *There are unique bid auctions with either paid or free bids.

Unique Bid Auction strategies for users

There is no perfect play (a strategy that guarantees a win) in unique bid auction games but there are a few approaches you can take to increase your odds.

1. Cover a continuous range of expected values
   This approach is good if there’s a large enough budget. An auction player makes all possible bid values starting from the maximum value they think will give them a good chance of winning. This strategy means that a player will spend more funds on bids, but also leaves less chances to other players to win as there are less spots left.
2. Cover a large range with stepped values or random values
   This approach is more budget-savvy. A player makes bids by defined steps (e.g. 0.7, 0.14, 0.21, etc) or makes random bids from different ranges to cover a broad amount of possible values. If a player sees in this case that they’re not winning there can easily track at which range there’s a spot left.
3. Mix of strategies described
   This strategy is even more budget efficient but at the same time brings a much higher risk. A player needs to keep up with the auction process till the end, and of course no bid-agent should be used in this case. Taking it differently, this approach saves the budget and brings more fun.