No. Bidding first costs you nothing that bidding later would save, and in a thin room it is frequently how items go cheaply.
What people are afraid of
That an opening bid "wakes the room up" and starts a contest that would not otherwise have happened.
It is a real effect and it is much smaller than people think. What actually wakes a room up is the seller — holding the thing up, saying what is good about it, saying what is wrong with it. A silent item with no bids does not sell for less because nobody bid; it often does not sell at all.
What bidding first actually gets you
The lowest possible price, if nobody follows. The opening bid is by definition the cheapest valid bid on that item. Every later bid is higher.
The seller's attention. A room where somebody bids is a room the seller talks to. You are far more likely to get your question answered about an item you have bid on.
Information. If you open and three people immediately follow, you have learned the item is contested and can stop. That costs you nothing.
Why waiting does not help
The format removes the advantage of lurking. On a standard auction, a bid in the final ten seconds pushes the clock back to ten seconds — so there is no last moment to pounce in. A late bidder gets the same auction as an early one, just with less information. The last ten seconds
What waiting does cost you: items that close with no bids at all while you were deciding. In a quiet show that happens, and it is the one genuinely missed opportunity in a live auction.
The exception worth knowing
If you are bidding against a maximum bid, being first is irrelevant — a ceiling answers instantly whenever it is passed, early or late. You will know because the item bids back the moment you touch it. I bid but someone else is showing as highest
The actual strategy
Decide your number before the item opens. Then bidding first, last or in the middle makes no difference — you bid up to your number and stop.
Better still, set it as a maximum and stop watching that item. The app bids one step at a time on your behalf, never above your number, and nobody sees it. What a maximum bid is
Everything people believe about bidding psychology on a live auction matters much less than having a number and keeping to it.
For sellers reading this
The lesson runs the other way: open low enough that the first bid is easy. A start price that asks the room to take the first risk is the commonest cause of an item getting no bids at all. How to price for auction
More: how auctions find a price, how bidding works, the ten seconds after a bid.