why do major auction houses get incredible results?
this is such a simple answer: because they deal with a majority of the wealthiest people on the planet.
That's the simplest answer. Factually, the uber-rich can do whatever they want to, day after day after day. They can buy what they want, they can pay what they want and if said purchases are worth what they pay or not.. means nothing. On Rodeo Drive (pronounced Ro-Day-O) you can buy a Hershey bar in most stores, including fashion boutiques. This bar costs $8-12 in these stores, but if you walk just 3 blocks away, you can find the same chocolate bar for $2 or $3. Do you think a gal spending $3000 or $30,000 on an evening gown she may only wear once, to tonight's party gives a shit how much it costs? That's not their calculation. The calculation is "I'm going to have a dress no one else will have, and I'm going to look good". The $30,000 is like a pimple on their bank account, because aside from having 100 million or a half a billion, their investments are making $30,000 a day for some of them and there are still 364 more days that year.
It's called 'more money than God'.
Consider this, a wealthy prince in Saudi Arabia decides to decorate one of his homes with posters and he looks for a place to buy. He already is a buyer of antiques, real estate, wines, rare cars etc etc etc at Sotheby's Christie's Heritage and it's just a short walk to go see their poster offerings. "Oh I want that poster. Bid bid bid bid bid. This is fun and now I have my poster". Do you think he gives any consideration at all to whether the poster will be worth what he paid if he sells? NO - because he is never going to sell. He will never need to sell, because he's making $30,000 an hour selling oil and all he wants is the money so he can buy his toys. "Clearly, some other princes are bidding against me, so there must be some value. Bid bid bid bid bid. Yay I win. Yay"
But here's another key: these people do not care about comparison shopping. Their time is too valuable (or so they say), because they make $3000 a day or $30,000 a day or $30,000 an hour, even if all the work is done by someone they hire to do so. Also, they are never likely to bid at places like eMovie, or eBay, or Amazon or even my site MPB. These sites aren't for them, because they all look like pimples on the face of the internet to them. When they deal with people at HA, or Sotheby's, they are bidding with other super-rich people. People like them.
eMovie, or MPB or Amazon is for the low class people, in part because of the apparent guarantees for instance from these auction giants and the fact that all of these giant corporations carry bonded insurance, so if I spend a million dollars and there is a dispute, I can get my money back. The big auction houses aren't run by 'pikers' in their minds, so they have a certain security in spending and doing business. When they go to Sotheby's, they see an immaculate 20,000 sq foot auction house. When they see Heritage, they have their name on top of a 24 story modern skyscraper, not an old warehouse that looks like a place where their floor scrubbers live. They will never do business with such an entity. They have nothing in common with people like us. So we don't get their bids.
The people who bought and bid on the Dr No quad for $87,000L will never sell, they don't care about value, they don't care how you or I see the buy. All they care about is "when we have the party next week, I have this great Bond poster on the wall (along with many others) and my friends all think I'm cool, because now that I have these posters, I am indeed cool."
There is also a good possibility that they do indeed know it's a $10,000 poster and don't care "because I have more money than God". Trying to pigeon hole these people into the pigeon holes we exist in is fake math, because these people aren't like 'US'.