The asking price
What the seller is asking, the manifest, the condition grade, the recovery estimate. Anyone browsing the yard sees all of it.
Fairness
The rules are public. The numbers are not.
A negotiation is only fair if neither side can read the other's limits. That isn't a promise we make in copy — it's a property of how the yard is built, and this page states exactly what each side can and cannot see, so you can check us against it.
Rule one
Nobody sees the other side's walk-away price.
Every seller sets a floor— the number below which they won't sell. Every buying agent runs under a cap — the number above which it may not bid. Both are secrets, and they are kept symmetrically.
Public
Seller only
The floor
Never sent to a buyer, a buying agent, or any public page — not as a number, not as a hint about how close an offer landed. Buyers learn only that an offer was accepted, countered, or declined.
Buyer only
The mandate cap
What a buyer authorized their agent to spend. Enforced on our side before an offer is ever recorded; sellers never see it, so it can't be used as an anchor against you.
Rule two
You are always told when software is playing.
Sellers can let an autopilot answer offers for them, and buyers can send an AI agent to bargain on their behalf. Both are legitimate — neither is allowed to be a secret. Every move made by software is labeled as such in the thread, for both sides. You should never discover halfway through a deal that you were talking to a program.
1
Automation is disclosed
An autopilot counter is badged autopilot. An agent's offer is badged agent, with the agent's name, and it always carries the identity of the person who authorized it.
2
Strategy is not disclosed
You get to know thatan autopilot is playing. You don't get to read its parameters, and neither does anyone else — including us, at the moment it moves. Poker rules are public; hole cards aren't.
3
Software can't break the floor
Every automated move — scripted or AI — is clamped by the same code that validates a human's click. An AI negotiator proposes a number; the rules decide whether it's allowed. It cannot be talked into going lower, because it isn't the thing enforcing the limit.
Rule three
Everyone plays one state machine, at one speed.
A human with a mouse, an AI agent on the API, and a seller's autopilot all move through the exact same code. No party gets an extra action, a faster lane, or a look at the thread the other side doesn't have.
Turn-based
Speed buys nothing
Offers alternate: one live number at a time, and the machine waits for whoever's turn it is. There is no queue to jump, so an agent that replies in milliseconds gains nothing over a person who replies tomorrow.
Atomic
No last look
An accept is final the instant it lands, under a lock. Neither side gets to see a committed price and then back out — the option to reconsider after the fact is the thing other markets get criticized for.
Same thread
No side channels
Both parties read the same ladder, the same live number, the same expiry. Nothing in a negotiation is visible to one side only — apart from the two secrets above, which are hidden from everyone on the other side.
Rule four
You can't probe your way to the floor.
The obvious attack on any automated seller is to bargain against it repeatedly until its behavior gives the limit away. Three things make that not work, and we'd rather describe them than pretend nobody will try.
1
The last number isn't the floor
An autopilot's final stand sits above the seller's real limit, by a margin drawn per lot. Grind it all the way down and what you find is the stand, not the secret. Sellers get the reverse guarantee: any offer that genuinely clears the floor is still accepted.
2
Opening more threads tells you nothing new
That margin is fixed per lot, so every negotiation on the same lot meets the same number — averaging across attempts converges on nothing. And each buyer gets one live thread per lot, so there's nothing to average in the first place.
3
Reading this page doesn't help you
The mechanism is public on purpose. The margin is derived from a secret unique to each lot, so knowing exactly how it works — as you now do — still leaves you unable to compute it for any particular lot.
4
And if you try anyway, it stops talking
Traffic that looks like measuring a seller's automation rather than buying from them — the same buyer reopening a lot over and over, a crowd of new identities at once, offers creeping up in meaningless increments — makes the autopilot stand down and hand the lot back to its human. Nothing is declined and the lot stays open; you just stop learning anything.
When several buyers want it
Contested lots switch to a sealed tender.
Haggling one thread at a time is fair when one buyer wants a lot. With three, it quietly sells to whoever happened to be mid-conversation when the seller got tired — not to whoever wanted it most. So the seller can pause the negotiations and call for sealed bids with a deadline instead.
The rule
You pay the runner-up's price
Highest bid wins, but pays the second-highestbid — or the seller's reserve, if that's higher. Never its own number.
Why that
Honesty is the winning move
Bid above what it's worth to you and you can only win a lot you overpaid for. Bid below and you can only lose one you wanted. So just bid your real maximum — there is no cleverness to add.
Sealed
Nobody watches, including us
No bid is visible to rivals or to the seller, and there is no running total to refresh. Bidding early or often gains exactly nothing.
One honest caveat, since this page is meant to be checkable: a pay-the-runner-up auction only works if you trust the venue not to invent a second-place bid. So when a tender closes we publish how many bids there were and the price it cleared at— enough to see the runner-up was real. We don't publish individual amounts, because that would hand every buyer's valuation to their competitors on the next lot.
Rule five
The house only plays the practice lot.
MarketYard is not a counterparty on real inventory. We don't bid, we don't take positions, and we don't hold a book against you — so there is no version of this where the platform trades on information it can only see because it runs the venue. The one lot we play is clearly labeled practice, uses no real money, and exists to teach the loop.
If that ever changes, it changes in public and behind the same information wall as every other participant. That's a condition on the idea, not a footnote to it.
Go check it yourself.
The practice lot runs these rules with play money and a hidden floor drawn just for your game. Find it if you can — that's the whole exercise.