In other words, oil firms and corporate takeover specialists keep on getting burned in auctions but persist in bidding too high. They simply don't learn. He posits that this is exactly why the three oil engineers published their article explaining the curse in 1971. Their hope was to induce other firms to reduce their bids. If so, it didn't work, since oil firms continue to overpay.
Online auctions worsen the winner's curse by increasing the number of bidders.
The craziest poor sucker in a group of 20,000 bidders on the Internet is likely to be crazier than the craziest one among 200 in a Burbank hotel ballroom. There's no satisfactory way to buy rare or one of a kind items, but online auctions are a particularly bad method. Either way, sellers would find their inflated profits eroded. But auctions have survived the winner's curse for millenniums, and even the Internet is unlikely to change that. To be sure, not all auctions are rip-offs.