Is fake bidding a thing?

Read an FT comment about Oracle entering the race to buy an app just to raise the price and reduce Microsoft's cash pile. Does this sort of thing happen often in the markets? Is this an actual strategy or is it something that's bad for goodwill?

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Some PE firms submit artificially high bids to keep themselves in the running/get a mgmt meeting..Long term not a great strategy as sell-side bankers won't show them as many deals/recommend them to mgmt.

 

Well if you do it 1% of the time it's almost impossible to tell and so it costs nothing but you get to 1% more first rounds, so it's strictly better than 0%. I'm sure there's an optimal percent probably around 10-20% fake bids to get data/second round

 
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I'd be more inclined in this case to have it be a political one. It looks better if there are multiple companies in the race for tik tok vs. simply handing it over to MSFT. That, if anything, is probably what is happening. 

 

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