Today's question in my GalaGal Inbox comes from a CAI colleague in Arizona:

Question:  Have you had any experience with filling in a range of bid amounts ahead of time and then let bidders just write in their bidder number next to an amount?

Reply:  

    That's really a preference.  Some benefit auctioneers swear by it, and others, like me, would rather let people set their own bid levels, as often serious bidders like to jump up in larger increments, and it's far easier to follow by writing in an amount than trying to draw a line downward and hope the next guy doesn't bid in the skipped boxes.

    We always set minimum increment raises, though, proportionate to the value of the item and the opening bid.

    In my experience, many of the people/organizations who tried to pre-print the bid increments do so with little to no instruction, often using a computerized software program they don't understand.  I've seen groups use $5 increments even if it's a $1000 item; I've seen bid options calculated at 50% of value, then 100% percent of value, then 150% of value and so on - thus those increments discouraged bidding; I've also seen groups rely on the computer to split the bids by percentages, and thus  bidding might open at $33.06 and the next level is $47.14, etc. with no rhyme or reason, making data entry much harder.

If you've got a program or staff who can understand and communicate bid increments to the guests in a way that makes sense, I think either way will work!