Interesting question. I think the answer here may depend a lot on the product at hand. If it is a Macbook, given the brand Apple has build, the product may indeed sell even better without a starting price. But that is not because the starting price is the most important factor, but rather, as I said, due to the great brand Apple has built and the strong demand that exists for their products. Indeed, I think the absence of a starting price when a great brand and enough demand exist, would gather a lot more people around an auction simply because the auction will feed their impression that they could buy a high value product for a cheap price, even though in the end they may pay more than they would have if the price was fixed.

So the natural question that arises now is do we have a strong enough brand to benefit from an absence of price or should we start with at least half the price we would expect to be minimum, as a safety precaution?

I was also thinking about Nassim Taleb's(some of you may be familiar to his ideas) antifragility theory and I think our aim should be to create an antifragile or at least resilient/robust market. Meaning that we should not fear the dumpers, but take them into account and even encourage(incentivize) them to get it over with as soon as possible. In fact, there may be some people who have received a stake but don't intend to help or keep it and so through this natural selection process the real supporters hold and contribute to the value of the movement while the dumpers exit and help us grow even faster by decreasing the risk to big dumping happening further down the road.