[Fred]

For the most part, people that have been in the hobby for a while and make purchases through auction houses are aware of the documented shill bidding that took place in the Mastro auctions. In a recent thread related to the Masto shill bidding the topic of auction house rules came up. Rather than continue on the topic in that thread, I figured it would be interesting to start a new thread about auction house rules. I'm going to guess that I'm like most people and rarely/never reads through all of the things we are accepting as terms of service, etc. We just hit the accept/acknowledge button and move on to bidding.

The following is item 21 of the Heritage auction rules. I was wondering if anybody has read through the other auction house rules and found the same language with regard to auction house employees bidding in the auctions? Am I just naive or is this a common practice/rule that is common for auction houses? The following is a direct copy/paste from the Heritage rules:



21. The Auctioneer, its affliates, or their employees consign items to be sold in the Auction, and may bid on those lots or any other lots. Auctioneer or affliates expressly reserve the right to modify any such bids at any time prior to the hammer based upon data made known to the Auctioneer or its affliates. The Auctioneer may extend advances, guarantees, or loans to certain consignors.


Any comments that defend the practice or abhor the policy would be interesting to read.