Possible Transfer Change ~ Bit of Auction Theory.

[Arkzein]

Currently the most irksome thing I find is the extra 24 hours for every bid on the transfer market, you can have auctions going on for ages as teams bid the minimum 5% each day and never know exactly when you're going to get that player. I believe the reduction from 8 to 6 days was evidence of the discontent of the buyers market currently? (Though I cannot read what opinion was on the Dutch forum where most users are)

I've been thinking on how best to fix this without leaving it as a seller's market (as it is currently) or a buyers market as simply removing the 24 hours would. I've been going over a bit of auction theory recently and came upon a good idea that would seem to be able to be implmented here to good effect.

What I would propose is a change from the current English auction style to an Anglo-Dutch auction. (as used by the UK very effectively in the sale of 3G licenses for example). Here's how it works:

For the six days things run as they do currently, namely an ascending English auction. At the end of the sixth day the top few bidders (perhaps three, or two as in the theory) (ie you have to have taken part in the bidding thus far, this encourages many bidders competing in this phase and helps buyers) get 24 hours to enter a hidden sealed Price final Offer, meaning this offer isn't seen by other players or the seller, though it must be equal or higher than the final bid from the six days, and at the end of the 24 hours the player is sold to the highest bidder.

This way you know when the player will be sold, yet the need to compete during the bidding phase as well as perhaps large (over-estimates perhaps) bids at the end will leave the sellers with a good price.

Problems? It still favours the sellers, in some cases perhaps more than the current system but in most, slightly less. Yet at least now the buyers have a good idea when an auction will end!

For the final sealed Price offer perhaps take all players who have made a bid within the last twelve hours that is within, say 20%, of the highest bid as well as the top three/top. (to prevent people waiting until the last second to place their bid and knocking someone out of the top three which could be infuriating). Problem being the more players you allow in here the more the auction favours the sellers.

Any thoughts from anyone else? May be a few more problems I have not seen myself but I believe those about could/would be the main considerations.

Note: This is something similar to how free players are handled now, at least the final phase is. Every bidder there enters a single sealed price final bid not knowing what anyone else has bid for the player and as you can see it encourages alot more bidders than the traditional auctions where bidders who think they may not have a chance stay out entirely. In the above system more will enter with the hope of being in the "top 3" as more and more drop out, which does push up the price for sellers to levels which should be comparable to what we have now.

[robborover]

hidden bids are a good idea but still time-consuming.

i still think the best method is to contact the selling team manager directly and ask for a price to sell at.

i agree that the 24 hour rule is unfair, but it's fairer than before where you just logged in at 2am and bid at the last moment (ala ebay).

[jojojo]

it to complicated they cant do everything

[Arkzein]

it to complicated they cant do everything

Let me bring it to a simpler level and cut out all that lovely reasoning then. (Though it is the auction theory that gives the proposal some basis rather than just some random thought).

Instead of adding 24 hours ad nausem after the six days let the top few bidders put in a final bid, but they can't see what the others offer and then the auction ends.

Simple enough?

*edit* And indeed asking the manager is the quickest way, (A way to get around the current system it could be argued, which shouldn't be necessary) but many will just let the auction run it's course currently in such a strong buyers market. Here as there is going to be a final bid anyway there is more incentive for such offers to be both made and accepted.

[sljivovica]

Dude, I really like this idea.
I'm not too happy with this 24-hour-extension myself, and this seems fair to both seller and buyer.
Plus it speeds up the buying-process very much. 6 days regular plus 1 day hidden.
I like it man!

[Arkzein]

Dude, I really like this idea.
I'm not too happy with this 24-hour-extension myself, and this seems fair to both seller and buyer.
Plus it speeds up the buying-process very much. 6 days regular plus 1 day hidden.
I like it man!

At least that's one.

[xcuze]

good idea mate...right now the bidding can go for ages something must be done.
I like it 2

[sljivovica]

Maybe I'll try to translate this tomorrow or one of these days and put it on the Dutch Forum. See what the opinions are.
The English Forum is too quite

[robborover]

yeah the dutch forum is where it all happens. every english manager should canvass for more managers!!!!

i'd say that most people agree that the transfer system is unfair though. a buyer can have to wait a couple of weeks for their player!

[Arkzein]

Sadly only one of my friends plays football manager games and he's an CM nut. I would have thought there would be loads of English speakers on a footy manager game though, rather odd.

It would be ncie to have the Dutch opinions though given they make up a lot of the userbase, perhaps I'm wrong in thinking that many even percieve it to be a problem!

[sljivovica]

Yeah, the Belgians dominate this game, but of course that's where it all started
I would like to see this game go totally world-wide... maybe in a few years.

[silverblast]

Yeah, the Belgians dominate this game, but of course that's where it all started
I would like to see this game go totally world-wide... maybe in a few years.

Well, I'd like to help as well translating this to Dutch but I believe my knowledge of the English is too limited to do so. So I guess it will be up to you to translate it.

About the proposal: I like it, but this neutralizes the bidwar-option, isn't it? I believe not much managers will like this, because, for an example, a manager has a lot of money and wants to pay a lot for a player he really needs. But, logically, this manager wants to pay as less as possible. That's called "intelligent money-management", isn't it?
But if that manager has to make a blind bid, not knowing how high other managers will bid, this could be dangerous because it's impossible to know if you're not paying too less or too much.

Well, it could be I totally misunderstood your proposal (as I said before, my English is not that impressive, I'm just 15 you know.) but if it is like I believe it is, then this would be one of the major problems.

Btw, sorry for the long boring text.

[Arkzein]

This will probably be a long post, but I have problems being concise.

I would hope it wouldn't be so for several reasons. Firstly, and most likely foremostly, the sealed bid final offer at the end encourages many of the managers who would otherwise stay out of auctions to enter on the off chance they get "lucky". Look at the free transfers of youths for some good empirical evidence of this. Now, these are going to go for 1.5-3 million euro almost certainly, the market going rate. Yet look how many bidders there are! Far, far more than the ascending auctions. I'd wager some of the "free" youths could actually go for more that on the free market. This is known as the "winners curse". The bidder with the highest value will win, but he may value the player more than he is actually worth!

Since the first phase of the auction is ascending many of these "lesser" bidders will enter with the hope of making it to the final offer stage with a lower bid (that is assuming they understand the system isn't just an ascending english auction!) but drop out of the confirmed price rises. This isn't a problem but it does serve to drive the bid up to going rate levels before the final bid stage.

Now, moving onto the final stage, yes players do tend to "shade their bids" meaning if they value the player at say, 3million Euro, to have some surplus utility they may bid 2.9 million. I'll not bore you with the economics behind it but generally it depends on the number of bidders in the final stage. More bidders means less shading of bids.


Let's take a worst case scenario. Superplayer X comes on the market and for some mad reason there are only two bidders who bid just one euro! We get to the final price closed offer part. Now Superplayer X should be worth, say, 20,000,000 at most. Knowing this these two bidders are still likely to bid a sizable amount.

In reality of course players will be fighting to get into those "top spots" to even have a chance in the final bid war which is the main method in driving up the minimum price the player will recieve.


In the end it will mean the sellers, on the whole, will be slightly worse off. (generally with small groups in sealed price final offers people will shade their bids somewhat due to fear of the "winner's curse"). Yet presently it is entirely a sellers market. They almost always recieve the full market value of their player. (Saying that though of the 12 hour, 20% of final offer system is used it could be the case that there are enough bidders in the final phase the sellers could be better off as the chances of someone from the group bidding higher than the player would have went for in the english auction rise!)

Also the above is entirely ignoring the added benefit of knowing when an auction will end which will add greatly to the utility of buyers in the market, and even slightly to the sellers.

[robborover]

although i think the sealed bid idea is a reasonable effort to improve the system, but it doesn't seem to alter anything (in terms of buying and selling) and only adds a lot of work for sjarel and co.

i just get the feeling that this would still favour the seller as they would just wait til the end. help players cheat higher bids. and also wreck the sp economy. at the moment it seems that the most expensive players are cm, cf, and cb. also, i believe the reason that boarding payments were reduced was to stabilise the economy (note to newbies: this happened about 3 seasons ago. before then boardings were literally worth 100k a time!). so why change this when players are sold after 24 hours when there hasn't been a bid?

i'm not saying the idea is not feasonable, this is only my opinion.

i would favor a chat module to arrange transfers. this would encourage more of a community feel to sp, and be fair to both buyers and sellers.

[Arkzein]

With the 24 hours extra system bidding can simply go on forever, which gets rather annoying. I recently noticed that a player whom I placed a bid on during the final day about a week or more ago is still there on the transfer market, lord knows how long he was on their before I dropped out.

You're right that it dosen't alter much in terms of buying and selling, at least in the amount of money players will both pay and recieve for their players, perhaps a little less for sellers on the whole (that was the intention after all, to leave the system as fair as possible without making it a buyers or sellers market) the one thing it does save is a great deal of time. A player will be sold after seven days for certain while still reaching comparable levels to now. (So I don't see how it could wreck the economy, or even effect it to any great extent) On the cheating issue it won't change anything from now, if players put in a massive over the odds bid they still recieve the player in both cases.

As for most just waiting until the end, that is a possible concern (But it is also the case now anyway, most people only bid on players a day or two before they are due to sell). Given the numbers that flock to seled price final offer auctions though (as with the free transfer currently) even in this case it wouldn't be an issue. Perhaps just having some firce bidding driving up the final price before the sealed phase, though likely there will be some early bidding in the "off chance" those bids make the top few (as seen in the free players market) which will actually help increase early bidding over what we have now.

Not sure on the implmentation side. I would assume it would be simple enough given the final phase is allready there in the free players system it would just take a convergence of the two I would hope. (I know little of computers and code though)

After all the waffle the main points with the idea would be in has comparable prices to now, and players will sell ofter a set, known time.


The main problem I could see to an open discussion market would be the language barrier, if using generic messages such as "Would you sell Player X for X" in the various langauages you have a more limited system which takes a bit of work to put in. Still, it is a great idea in and of itself and no reason why it could run alongside the current, or a new, transfer system. After all the easiest way to get around the long wait for a transfer to come through is still to speak to the player directly and arrange a price. (Though many just let it run on the auction knowing they'll get the best price from it)

I couldn't see it as an only system though, the lack of competitive market prices would leave the sellers without enough information to set "correct" prices and it would become a strong buyers market.