I'm a little late to this now-rambling thread, but I would just add one more thing which hasn't been discussed:
Opportunity cost & the time-value of money This comes into play in addition to how values are affected by personal taste, connection with the movie, income, scarcity, status, etc...
Brian, you are a lawyer, correct? I'm not going ask your billable rate, but for the sake of argument lets say it is $250/hr. And T, regardless of whether you have money in the bank or not, I assume you have an income of some sort? It's irrelevant what you do, but lets say it is either a burger flipper $8/hour or a screenwriter who makes $100k a year -- which after 8 weeks vacation (f*@k you and your French lifestyle!
), 1 week of holidays, 5 days/week, 8 hour days that works out to $58/hour. You both want a Pulp Fiction advance:
BRIAN -- Gets an eMovieposter alert that Bruce has one for sale. He puts in his bid and wins it for $1,500.
THIERRY -- Checks ebay, with friends, forums, etc... for 3 minutes a day for two years trying to find the PF adv on the cheap (~36 hrs). He gets frustrated and eventually finds the Struzens (~2 hours) and, after waiting for the drop, hitting refresh, etc... (~1 hour), he buys an extra copy as trade-bait for $280. Then after more searching for willing traders (~3 hours) and packaging up the poster and mailing it (~1 hour), he finally gets his PF adv for $280.
If Brian took T's approach, he would have spent 43 hours during his search, which is worth about $10,750 of income, to finally get the poster for $280. The total cost being $11,030. What a bargain!
If T is a burger flipper, he would have put $215 worth of time into getting that poster for $280 -- a total of $495. If T is burger flipper his time unfortunately isn't valued very high and it's worth while to put in time to search -- which ultimately gets him more value than flipping burgers.
If T is a $100K/yr screen writer, he would have put $2,494 worth of time into geting the poster for $280 -- a total of $2,774. Not such a great use of his time afterall -- unless he is keeping track of his wasted time in his spreadsheet that is
Obviously the numbers are fuzzy and just used as examples -- but 'overpaying' at $1,500 through Bruce doesn't look so bad to me. And I say this as someone who operates exactly like T, spending probably a minimum of an hour a day searching for posters. My wife often tells me that she would like me to stop searching for posters, get a part time job and just buy what I want. She is convinced in the end that I will ultimately buy exactly the same number of posters and still have more time to spend with her and our daughter.
Food for thought.
