> If I've already gone through a lot of the process to decide to buy something at a certain price [...] then I've already spent some not-insignificant amount of resources on the purchasing process.

Yes, that's part of what I was trying to account for with my second bullet point. But before you've made that initial decision, there must be some price that would cause you to make it a 'yes' and some marginally higher price that would cause you to make it a 'no'.

This value obviously won't be totally constant across time -- it will vary with your mental state. But at any given time (and for any given roll of the mental dice, if we're assuming there's some true indeterminism here), it must exist. So when we're translating from "what's the maximum I would pay" to "what should I bid", we can imagine that we're in our most rational and clear-thinking frame of mind, aren't seized by any strange impulses, and so on.

The time and effort of researching a different item also has a value that could be pinned down in a similar way. So it doesn't fundamentally change the arguments here; if product A would be worth $X in a vacuum, but you'd happily pay $Y to avoid going through the research process again, then you should bid $X+Y.

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mort96 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Before I have made that initial decision, and before I have invested resources into evaluating what I think the value of a product is, I do not have a price in mind. Deciding on a price I think is fair for a product takes effort. The more accurately I want to determine it, the more effort it is.

Could there exist some hypothetical subjective value? I mean maybe. But not one that I have knowledge of, so it's not something that can even hypothetically affect my behavior. The only time at which I could possibly be aware of my own subjective value judgement of a product necessarily has to be after I have invested time to evaluate it.

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retsibsi an hour ago | parent [-]

So what is the problem? You've done the research, and your best estimate for the value is $X. And if you had to put a dollar value on avoiding doing the research again, it would be $Y. You put in a maximum bid of $X+Y, walk away from the auction, and come back to see that you won at a lower price (great!), won at your max price (fine), or lost (also fine; $X+Y was right at the threshold of what you considered worth paying, even accounting for the extra research you'll now have to do. Maybe if you look at the final price and see that you lost by 1c, you'll feel annoyed... but if that's anything more than an irrational emotional response, then why didn't you bid 1c more in the first place? You were free to enter any number you wanted, and you knew in advance that this might happen. If it is just an irrational emotional response, you can avoid that next time by not looking at the final price unless you win.)

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mort96 an hour ago | parent [-]

Neither $X nor $Y are going to be hard dollar values. If I semi-arbitrarily pick some $X and some $Y, put in $X+$Y as my max bid, and lost the item due to $0.01, I would be annoyed not due to some irrationality but because $X and $Y were never cent-accurate in the first place.

	▲	retsibsi an hour ago \| parent [-]
		They'll never be cent-accurate, but if you've done a decent job then they should be in your zone of rough indifference. Then you can simply avoid that annoyance by not looking at the final price, safe in the knowledge that at worst you may have missed out on a marginally worthwhile purchase by marginally underestimating its value. If that's not the case, you didn't bid enough in the first place. (But also, how is the annoyance not irrational? Your estimates weren't cent-accurate, but they were just as likely to be slightly too high as slightly too low. And you haven't learned anything new about the true values -- unless you take your emotional reaction to be new evidence. For your emotional reaction to be new evidence, it has to be somewhat unpredictable, otherwise you could have fully factored it in in advance. But you seem to be saying that you're predictably going to be annoyed by a 1c loss.)