Not a great analogy but somewhat and sometimes true

If you do a lot of bidding and track a lot of items on E-Bay, you are only allowed to have a maximum of 30 items on your 'Watch List'

Once that list is full, we sometimes will enter a bid on an item that interests us. The maximum bid will traditionally be the opening bid minimum.

In this way, we can effectively 'Watch' as many items as we care to without much risk of winning unless you decide to up your bid sometime during the run of the auction.
On a 'no reserve' auction we also sometimes can, but not often,win an auction at an undervalued ending price.

E-Bay used to have a 20 max for their 'watch List' but recently 'generously'added another 10.

You would think that they would leave that list open ended as I would think that the more items you can watch, the more you are likely to bid on and the more $ they would make????