Trust me, if we ever hit it big, we will hire at least one egghead to work solely on this kind of thing. In the meantime, as Trip suggests, we have to limit ourselves to work that is manageable and as straightforward as possible. But I agree that we should do everything in our power to come up with SOME kind of value--anything is better than nothing, provided you are very conservative. I'll mention that I still haven't finished the appraisal work that I started more than a year ago (trickier than it sounds). The plan was to try to use member collection data to fill in gaps left by the auction matching stuff, and I still think that will close up most of the holes fairly satisfactorily. But if there are STILL holes after that, it strikes me that we could probably do worse than just using the known MSRP price if we have it, just straight, particularly if you own the toy in its sealed state. It would be laughably off-base for vintage stuff, like Ed says, but it would be better than nothing. If your toy is so obscure that we have no auction OR member data for it, then it might be fairly safe to assume that it's still worth at least what it would have cost at the store.
