I'm a very experienced buyer and seller on eBay. Cstorr2004 is correct. At the bottom of each eBay listing, where you enter your bid, there is a minimum amount you must enter for your bid to be accepted. Say the current bid for an item is $5, by someone named Smith, and the minimum bid is $1 more, so you bid $6. You may then get a screen that says your bid was not high enough. So you try $7. That turns out not to be high enough either. So you bid $8. You keep going in $1 increments until your bid is finally accepted. Say that is $11.
What that means is that Smith's bid of $5 was the highest amount necessary to display to other bidders at the time of Smith's bid, but that doesn't necessarily mean Smith only bid $5. He could have bid $10, but if a $5 bid would suffice at the time of the bid, that's what appears in the eBay ad. Now, if you check the bid history after your $11 bid was accepted, you will see six bids for Smith, his original $5 bid plus another automatic bid for each time you tried to outbid him and failed. That has nothing to do with the seller trying to jack up the bid price.
There are, of course, some dishonest people on eBay who fraudulently attempt to jack up the bid price on behalf of a seller, but this is most likely to happen with fairly high-ticket items where the payoff is worth the effort. A $22 payoff is unlikely to be that. In addition to being high ticket, the item generally has to be unique. If someone else is selling the same or similar items for a lot less, potential bidders will give that person their business. This is generally true of popular knives on eBay--Emerson, Kershaw, Spyderco, CRKT, and the like; there are nearly always multiple offerings from which to choose, and that keeps the prices more or less in line with each other.
Having said that, though, let me add this: I can't tell you how many auctions I've lost on eBay because bidders don't do their homework and find out what the items they bid on are worth before they start going crazy. They often end up paying a good deal more for a used or new but incomplete item from a private seller with no customer service or satisfaction guarantee who overcharges for shipping than that same item would cost new from a reputable online merchant with an 800 number to call, a return policy, and a reasonable charge for shipping. Sometimes two bidders get into a bidding war and bid an item sky high, well beyond the item's value, and driving away other bidders (like me), until one of them gets his Pyrrhic victory. In this situation, bidding becomes an act of machismo and an end in itself, rather than a means to win something at auction for a good price. There are a lot of nuts out there.
