Q:

Does Amber's bidding process have known issues, and if so, how can they be fixed? 

I recently acquired at some considerable cost a copy of Amber Diceless Role-Playing, which I had long wondered about.  Knowing of some potential players of the game at my local game store, I posted on their website asking about interest in getting a game together. 
No sooner had I done this than I was bombarded with demands that I announce how I would deal with the problems with the stat auction process — which quickly became mildly acrimonious, causing me to withdraw the suggestion altogether. 
What are the known issues with the bidding process, and what fixes are there for them? 
I've combed the web but the majority of the search engine hits are dead links now, and the sites I do find are moribund. 

A:

It's impossible to determine from the information you give what "the" problem with the attribute auction is.  There are certainly well known ways to try to game the system - they're even noted in its Wikipedia entry - but they are arguably part of the cutthroat competition aspect of the game.   Some folks have proposed alternate schemes to the auction to mitigate these perceived problems. 

A:

There are issues with the auction process that can be dealt with in multiple ways.  One would be to skip the auction and have all the players design their characters within a points budget decided by the ref, then assign ratings based on actual points spent.  
This is likely to end up with players who have no idea how they rate against the other players and this will affect play (you don't know how to scheme against the other players successfully, if you have no idea how their stats compare to yours).  This isn't necessarily bad, but does affect play. 
Another possible solution is to have a two-round auction, with the ability to give a second bid, after the initial ranking has been read out. 
Then, of course, you can just run with it as written, it does have some charm and if one (or more) players are dead set at being 1st in one attribute or another, they can easily end up with fewer points left than they initially intended.