When you are making a blind bid, the only information you have is the home itself. The ceiling for your bid is on what you think the house is "worth". You are very conscious about "overpaying" because you have no perspective on what other people are offering.
In open bidding, you are competing against other offers and the ceiling is basically what you can afford to pay.
Can't tell you how many times we lost offers because we didn't want to overpay - when the sold price was revealed we realized we would've paid another $25K on that had we known.
> In open bidding, you are competing against other offers and the ceiling is basically what you can afford to pay.
Well, what someone else can afford (and is willing) to pay. i.e. you never overpay, pretty much by definition.
(I think there probably exist 'open' auction system where the highest bid (not second) is paid, but the main ones don't work like that, and nobody's suggesting that as far as I've seen.)
And I don't see that ghost bids propping it up would be much of a problem, they'd risk winning? You could require registering names, putting a deposit down perhaps, no real need for it to be anonymous even?