Auction to get your Genome?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/23/business/23genome.html?scp=15&sq=auction&st=cse

There apparently was an auction for genome mapping offered by Knome. They state that the starting bid would be $68k and that anything below $99k would be a good deal. I haven't checked the results, but I expect that the final price would be more or less what the mapping costs to begin with. Mapping is popular enough that there will be a lot of bidders who are trying to look anything less than the actual going price. This will cause the bids to bump right up against that price and obviously there is no advantage to go higher.

Although there is a posted bargain price, I could easily see other people bidding above this mapping price. I don't think that mapping a price will prevent people from bidding above the bargain price, but I think it may decrease the number of people who do continue to bid. The value for this may decrease to those who think it's not worth the price tag, but I think that others will increase their bid, above the bargain price by just a little and that will trigger continuous bidding because an extra 100 or so isn't much compared to the total price. Instead, I think as the bidding price increases, more people will drop out of the bid and this will continue until only one person thinks it's worth the price tag.