Pipe Auctions and Auction Culture

Pipe auctions are sales in which collectible pipes change hands through open bidding. Some are devoted entirely to tobacciana; a far larger share are mixed sales in which pipes appear as scattered lots within catalogs of memorabilia, literature, or decorative objects. As online bidding has spread, the pool of participants in these sales has widened, and results have come to show an increasingly hard-to-predict spread. For the history of the salerooms and institutional sales, see Pipe Auctions.

What the House Estimate Does and Does Not Tell You

An auction house publishes a value range for each lot, known as the "house estimate." This range is not a forecast of how the sale will end, but the opinion the house's specialist forms at the outset. It is a settled view among collectors that at houses without an expert versed in pipe values, this range can carry a wide margin of error. In practice, this means a lot can sell for many times its estimate in the very same catalog where a fine example from a well-known brand fails to draw a single bid.

In an ascending-bid auction, the price is not a magnitude measured in advance but an outcome constructed in the room. "The Bidder's Curse," a 2011 study by Ulrike Malmendier and Young Han Lee published in the American Economic Review, showed that in online auctions, the winning bid exceeding the price of an identical item offered simultaneously at a fixed price is not the exception but the common case — and that this tendency persists even among highly experienced bidders. Nor does the participant's tally end with the hammer price: the house's own cut (the buyer's premium) and shipping-related charges are added on top; at some houses the premium approaches a fifth of the sale price.