The Opening Tenth

An auction catalogue is a running order. Lot 1 goes first, lot 400 goes some hours later, and everyone involved knows the order is not random: houses lead with the things they want noticed.

What nobody publishes is whether it matters to the person selling.

Leitz Photographica has published the result of every lot it has sold since 2005, with its number in the sale attached. Twenty-one years of running orders, and the answer sitting in them.

Does where your camera sits in the sale change what it makes?

It does. Two cameras of the same kind, the same condition and the same estimate: the one that runs in the first few minutes beats its estimate almost half the time. The one that runs after lunch manages it three times in ten.

The comparison

Comparing lot 12 against lot 480 is not a fair test on its own, because the house puts its best things early. To take that away we compared only lots that were alike in the ways that matter:

• the same condition — grade A only, as the catalogue records it
• the same price bracket — estimated between €800 and €6,000
• ranked inside their own sale, so a 780-lot catalogue from 2005 and

a 397-lot one from 2026 are measured on their own terms

That leaves 5,593 lots. Everything about them is comparable except when they came up.

A camera in the opening tenth makes 96% of its top estimate. Move it to the middle of the same afternoon and it makes 83%.

Both measures move together. On the odds of beating the estimate the gap is sixteen percentage points — 46% against 30% — and on 5,593 lots a gap that size would arise by chance less than once in ten thousand times.

The shape is not what you would expect

The obvious explanation is bidder fatigue — a long sale, a tiring room, attention thinning as the afternoon wears on. That predicts a steady decline to the last lot.

It is not what happens.

Median result as a share of the top estimate, by position within the sale. Grade A lots estimated €800–6,000 only, positioned against the full running order of their own catalogue.

The advantage is concentrated at the very front and it fades fast — by a quarter of the way in, most of it has gone. The low point is not the end of the sale but the third quarter of it, and the closing lots recover a little. We have no explanation for that last part and are not going to invent one.

What that suggests

We can only speculate about the mechanism, and we will say plainly that this part is speculation.

A sale opens with the room full, the online bidders newly logged in, and every budget intact. Nobody has spent anything yet. An hour later some of the people who wanted a 1960s Leica have bought one, and the ones who have not are working out what they have left.

Whatever the cause, the effect is confined to the beginning, and it is smaller than the raw numbers first suggested. Being at 15% rather than 60% of the way through is worth something. Being in the first tenth is worth more.

What to do with it

If you are consigning, the running order is worth asking about. A house decides it, and most sellers never think to raise it. On a €3,000 camera, the gap between the opening tenth and the middle of the sale is around four hundred euros on these numbers.

If you are bidding, the same finding reads backwards. Competition is fiercest at the start. The middle of the afternoon is where lots most often go below their estimate — not the end, which is where most people would guess.

And if you are simply watching, it is a useful corrective. An auction is not a machine for discovering what an object is worth. It is a room, on a particular afternoon, containing a particular number of people who still have money — and the answer it gives depends a little on when it is asked.