I respectfully disagree with the breadth of the premise.
For items of true rarity (even unique), I accept that it is difficult to ascertain a firm value. Therefore sales results can be quite surprising. At the extreme of this are one-of-a-kind items, like original oil paintings. To me, the seller of such an item has equal power to a buyer (or buyers) in setting the price.
But in terms of cards, the number that would fall into this categary are quite few.
Most cards are readily and frequently traded to the point where we can pretty easily determine value. And since many are sold by no-reserve auctions, in these cases the buyers set the market price.
Personally I think there is no card in T206 that is rare enough to apply the "each one is different" art-like approach. The Wagner may be looked at this way, but not because of rarity...rather because of the extreme high value.
For pretty much all other T206s, you can be assured there will be plenty of transactions of graded examples, and if you examine these transactions you'll see a trend. A result outside that trend is an outlier, and if the trend is a strong one, I can fully understand why someone might be surprised by an outlier.
The examples of people who are rich and don't care about money etc., if true, only create outlier transactions. Personally I disregard these things in my evaluation of true "worth". (Classic example is BINs from eBay.) I am a long term collector with patience and knowledge...I don't care what other types of people do on a whim.
Where the item in question is frequently traded, IMO the seller has little part in determining "worth".
It doesn't matter if I think my T206 Piedmont Bill Carrigan in a 4 is the best one ever and "worth" $500 to me...that has no bearing on the real "worth". It just means I'll keep it forever.
And if I think my Apple stock is "worth" $1000, that has no effect on its real "worth", since there is enough of it out there to trade daily for a lot less than that. It just means I'll be keeping it.
I suppose my real problem with the OP is that taken to its limit, the idea is that there is no way to determine the value of cards, other than to accept what a seller is asking for. While this is what dealers want people to think, it isn't true.
Cheers,
BLair
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