I always enjoy your contributions and it makes me sad that you use the site less than you would because of a/the downvote stalker.* I'm interested in applying microeconomics to these sorts of domestic or between-friends situations in which it might conventionally be taboo to do so, and this type of bidding in particular is something I've wondered about, so thanks for posting this!

*(I am not sure how easy it would be for an admin to look at the database and figure out what to do once someone's been identified as a downvote stalker, but I'm skeptical it would not be worthwhile at least trying to sort it out given how destructive it is, and at the very least I'd like to know why it seems nothing's been done. (Not to assign blame, but to try to figure out how we can get faster response on such issues in future.) If there really is one or a small number of people behind most of the downvote stalking, then checking the downvotes against victims should take (<)<15 minutes. I'd put >80% probability on this turning up one or more stalkers even just doing a naive database query using the set of victims in this thread.)