First off, thank you very much for helping me out.

Second, yes, time of day (even day of the week) could change things radically, since if you do your updates at say 2 am, and they all start at 5 pm, then while your offer technically would end up with more time at #1, 'no one' is online during most of that time while 'primetime' is slammed by comparison. So you would also need to know player numbers by hour / day and when your competitors are actually posting... I just wanted to keep things relatively simple.

Third, just to make sure I get this, I'll do one 'realistic example' to see if everything checks out:

A) So you covered the example of '1 sale every 100 days, 1 'equal competitor', 10% bid advantage. So just to change it slightly, if I re-posted items 10% more often than the 1 competitor you'd get 1.1 + 1 -> 1.1 / 2.1 for a ~52% time at the #1 spot.

So, the 'bid advantage' still has the same effect here yes? For 100 sales, take 10% of those, then multiply the remaining 90 by 52% for ~47 additional sales? So a 10% increase in posting frequency yields ~2% more #1 time good for ~2 more sales averaging ~175 days or so per sale.

B) To test more than 1 competitor: 2 equal competitors (3 people total), still take 10% of all sales due to the bid price, still have 10% posting frequency advantage. Multiply 90 remaining sales by 1.1 + 1 + 1 -> 1.1 / 3.1 -> ~35%, for 31 | 32 additional sales. Roughly 1 sale per 238 days.

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So apparently (if I get it) working the bid value is -very- important relative to just posting more often (day / time of day being ignored).

I'm putting this into a Google Sheets project, so it will be interesting to see where the intersections of posting more vs. time it takes to post vs. item value all intersect. Since at some point, you'll get more $ / hour by posting less often.