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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Nerva, post: 2793626, member: 87761&quot;]I&#039;ve seen a few discussions about making agreements to step back from coins of mutual interest that come up at auction. I think we need to be really careful about that. At one extreme, holding back because you notice the high bidder is a friend, but you haven&#039;t discussed the lot or made any agreement, is obviously unobjectionable. At the other extreme, clubbing together in a &#039;ring&#039; to agree to pool resources and then auctioning off the won lots secretly, splitting the difference in price between the ring, is obvious illegal and I hope obviously immoral. It defrauds the sellers and the auction houses. But there&#039;s a grey area in between. </p><p><br /></p><p>In the US the Sherman Anti-Trust Act makes it a felony to collude or rig bids. The statute is broadly worded, and case law has established that bid rigging cannot be justified as reasonable. It doesn&#039;t matter that no payment passes between parties. In the 1960s electric company executives were imprisoned for taking it in turns to bid for contracts, with no actual consideration passing between them. If you agree to hold back this time, and there&#039;s an explicit or implicit quid pro quo that the other guy will hold back next time, you might be guilty of a crime. </p><p><br /></p><p>I don&#039;t suppose coin auctions are a high priority for the justice department and I don&#039;t expect CoinTalkers to be carted off to jail. But it&#039;s not hard to imagine an aggrieved seller suing over a coin that&#039;s sold cheap because of an agreement between the two or three collectors who really wanted it. And some of us will be sellers from time to time. It undermines the whole auction process if the likely buyers have decided in advance who will bid on which coins. At a time when the public associates our hobby with looting and terrorist financing (however unreasonably), we should ensure we&#039;re being seen to do the right thing. </p><p><br /></p><p>I&#039;m not a lawyer and I&#039;m not offering legal advice, although I have had legal advice on anti-trust law from leading law firms and everyone receiving the advice was surprised by the law&#039;s scope so I now err on the side of caution. But even if it&#039;s on the right side of legality, there must be a point where colluding against the interests of the seller offends against morality as well as legality.</p><p><br /></p><p>Justice department guidance can be found here: <a href="https://www.justice.gov/atr/price-fixing-bid-rigging-and-market-allocation-schemes" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://www.justice.gov/atr/price-fixing-bid-rigging-and-market-allocation-schemes" rel="nofollow">https://www.justice.gov/atr/price-fixing-bid-rigging-and-market-allocation-schemes</a>[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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