Sedo is notorious for making sellers pick low reserves to “encourage more bidders” and while it sometimes work, frequently there aren’t enough bidders in the first place, so names end up with low prices. This mostly refers to GreatDomains auctions.

Next GreatDomains event has these names in the list, among others:

Attended.com no reserve
Calcium.net $1-$499
Debbie.net no reserve
Doctor.net $5,000-$9,999
Illicit.com $1,000-$4,999
Doorway.com $1,000-$4,999

Now some of these reserves are just ridiculously low, someone will get bargains!
I think low reserves only hurt the sale, there should be either no reserve at all, like on snapnames and bido, or a fair reserve like there is usually in TRAFFIC auctions and good sedo auctions. Low reserves will just reduce the domain’s value in the eyes of the buyer. A quick example is when I recently sold my coriander.com for just $5100 on greatdomains auction with reserve $5k, after it went up to $9k on a sedo auction previously, shy of reaching its reserve. There are simply not enough bidders to create a bidding war to get the price up, especially now due to summer, recession, election, global warming..