I still don't understand the point of this. There's a maximum amount of money one is willing to spend in order to acquire the item. Enter this amount as the bid. If he gets it, then he's spent that amount or less. If he doesn't get it, then it cost too much for him. Period.

I guess the problem might be that there are doofuses out there that just don't understand this, so they continue this sniping bullshit instead of just entering their maximum bid to begin with, and that means that it looks like under certain circumstances that the price the non-sniper paid to acquire an item got jacked up at the last minute, and he got screwed. But that's not really the case, because if that sniping idiot had just entered his highest bid at the beginning, then the non-sniper would have paid the same price, but just known about it for longer. Sniping from other people, on average, should actually lower the non-sniper's end cost because of the fact that the snipers miss the auction sometimes and that they often, even in the snipe, don't enter their maximum purchase price.