Quotes & Sayings About Auction

When Robert Benton was doing the movie 'In the Still of the Night,' I'd choreographed the auction scene and supplied the paintings and had a bit part - I was bidding against Meryl Streep. — Arne Glimcher

The tremendous leisure industry that has arisen in the last few generations has been designed to help fill free time with enjoyable experiences. Nevertheless, instead of using our physical and mental resources to experience flow, most of us spend many hours each week watching celebrated athletes playing in enormous stadiums. Instead of making music, we listen to platinum records cut by millionaire musicians. Instead of making art, we go to admire paintings that brought in the highest bids at the latest auction. We do not run risks acting on our beliefs, but occupy hours each day watching actors who pretend to have adventures, engaged in mock-meaningful action. — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods. — H.L. Mencken

The current climate doesn't represent a threat to the production of art but to the market. I think it's time for artists to get over auction houses, galleries, and high-production-value exhibitions and start using our voices again. — Maurizio Cattelan

To dissociate politicians from capitalists is slightly disingenuous, to put it mildly. U.S. lawmakers are competitive and auction themselves to the highest bidder via the lobby system. — Tariq Ali

I love that name. A country named Chad. Sounds like somebody who lived next door to the Brady Bunch. But if Chad actually lived next door to the Bradys, Greg would be roasting over a slow fire and Marcia would be standing naked on an auction block, because Chad is one of the hungriest, craziest, most desperate places on the planet. — Gary Brecher

Scott has to be one of the most talented artists I've ever seen. He really captures his subjects in a unique way. He is extremely generous as well. How many artists are willing to donate some of their best works to charity? The Texas Sports Hall of Fame has benefited greatly from Medlock's donated paintings, which are the cornerstones of our auction! — Bob Lilly

I am not opposed to the art market. I have lots of friends who are collectors. But the whole idea of the art market is complex. Sadly we have a situation where auction houses and secondary market dealers are creating a lot of confusion and unnecessary pollution. — Olafur Eliasson

I have this beautiful antique silver wine decanter that I bought at an auction. I always pour wine from that. — Paul Lynde

So, you're seeing the Rolls-Royces and the Bentley's still selling for big prices. You're seeing jewelry still selling, art works at auction. There was a diamond that sold for I think 38 million, 48 million, something like that just a week ago. So prices are back up to their highs, getting stronger and more and more people seem to have more and more money to spend. — Robin Leach

Let's say you need a perfectly obedient servant who never gets tired, never needs to be paid, and is virtually indestructible. If you're in a galaxy a long time ago and far, far away, you'll just fly off to the local droid auction and pick up one of those shiny gold models with lovely manners. — Kage Baker

By and large, the making of serious, thoughtful and occasionally valuable art has become a lonely persuasion, while the marketing of art has become a boutique operation, manipulated by fashion, self-serving art scholars and the vagaries of the auction block. — Abe Ajay

I used to save all my rejection slips because I told myself, one day I'm going to autograph these and auction them. And then I lost the box. — James Lee Burke

From The Auction
I left my home with unencumbered will
And all the rubbish of confusion sold. — Theodore Roethke

I couldn't help but remember the one at my parents' place after they had passed. I'd gone through their things and hadn't kept much, but when it came time for the auction I'd had a strong impulse to bid on everything like some museum curator attempting to keep the collection whole. — Craig Johnson

We live in a drug culture! Drugs are everywhere and touted as the panacea for every ailment in our society. We have drugs for hyper children, drugs for depression - some of the most insidious drugs ever - , drugs for allergies, drugs for acne, drugs for emphysema and drugs for erectile disfunction - maybe the most useful of them all. And let's not forget the side effects of these wonder drugs! It's cliche to even talk about drug advertisements and the laundry list of side effects tacked onto the end of them, usually rattled off at warp speed by someone on loan from the local auction house. I've seen ads for acne medicines that include side effects that are potentially fatal! Seriously? "Hey! Buy our Acne-Magic Drug! You'll have crystal clear skin! In your coffin!" What the hell is wrong with us? — Steve Bivans

The brilliant sunshine lay like a golden shawl over the rich mountain city that morning my train set me down for the first time in my life in young Denver. The names of strange railroads incited me from the sides of locomotives at the depot. As I passed up 17th Street a babble of voices from the doors of clothing stores, auction houses and pawn broker shops coaxed and flattered me with 'Sir' and 'Young Gentleman'. There was something in the streets I walked that morning, in the costly dress of the ladies in passing carriages, in the very air that swept down from the mountains, something lavish, dashing and sparkling, like Lutie Brewton herself, and I thought I began to understand a little of her fever for this prodigal place that was growing by leaps and bounds. — Conrad Richter

From the instant of our first meeting I judged him so, though it could be said that I was prejudiced. When one is standing naked on a slave-auction block in a wind cold enough to freeze a demon's backside, one is unlikely to have a fair impression of anyone. — Carol Berg

What do you hope to acquire when you bid at a prestigious evening auction at Sotheby's? A bundle of things: a painting of course, but hopefully also a new dimension to how people see you. As Robert Lacey described it in his book about Sotheby's, you are bidding for class, for a validation of your taste. — Don Thompson

We saw farms go on the auction block while we bought food from foreign countries. Well, that's wrong. — Ann Richards

I snapped the crossbow into the top of the mount, took a canvas bundle from the cart, and unrolled it. Crossbow bolts, tipped with the Galahad warheads.
"This is my baby." I petted the stock.
"You have a strange relationship with your weapons," Roman said.
"You have no idea," Raphael told him.
"This from a man with a living staff and a man who once drove four hours both ways for a sword he then put on his wall," I murmured.
"It was an Angus Trim," Raphael said.
"It's a sharpened strip of metal."
"You have an Angus Trim sword?" Kate's eyes lit up.
"Bought it at an estate auction," Raphael said. "If we get out of this alive, you are invited to come to my house and play with it."
It was good that Curran wasn't here and I was secure in our relationship, because that totally could be taken the wrong way. — Ilona Andrews

What happens if you make it back from the Slat? If the auction goes as planned and we manage this feat?"
"Then you get your ship and your future."
"And you?"
"I wreak all the havoc I can until my luck runs out. I use our haul to build an empire."
"And after that?"
"Who knows? Maybe I'll burn it to the ground."
"Is that what makes you different from Rollins? That you'll leave nothing behind? — Leigh Bardugo

Now people look at 'The Scream' or Van Gogh's 'Irises' or a Picasso and see its new content: money. Auction houses inherently equate capital with value. — Jerry Saltz

Hard information on the quantity of bogus art sold is difficult to come by, in part because fraud, when discovered by dealers and auction houses, is usually kept secret to boost public confidence in the art market. — Peter Landesman

Here I am, proud as Greek god, and yet standing debtor to this blockhead for a bone to stand on! Cursed be that mortal inter-indebtedness which will not do away with ledgers. I would be free as air; and I'm down in the whole world's books. I am so rich, I could have given bid for bid with the wealthiest Praetorians at the auction of the Roman empire (which was the world's); and yet I owe for the flesh in the tongue I brag with. By heavens! I'll get a crucible, and into it, and dissolve myself down to one small, compendious vertebra. — Herman Melville

You do it a day at a time. You just put your rejection slips in a shoebox and tell yourself one day you're going to autograph them and sell them at auction. — James Lee Burke

But when the leaders choose to make themselves bidders at an auction of popularity, their talents, in the construction of the state, will be of no service. They will become flatterers instead of legislators; the instruments, not the guides, of the people. If any of them should happen to propose a scheme of liberty, soberly limited, and defined with proper qualifications, he will be immediately outbid by his competitors, who will produce something more splendidly popular. Suspicions will be raised of his fidelity to his cause. Moderation will be stigmatized as the virtue of cowards; and compromise as the prudence of traitors; until, in hopes of preserving the credit which may enable him to temper, and moderate, on some occasions, the popular leader is obliged to become active in propagating doctrines, and establishing powers, that will afterwards defeat any sober purpose at which he ultimately might have aimed. — Edmund Burke

By nature, an auction is kind of a wholesale beast anyway. You're buying second hand goods, even with the historical, antique or aesthetic value. You look to get the wholesale price and you hope for retail spikes periodically when you get two or three people in the audience that want the same thing. — Paul Brown

Step 1: Decide What Capital Market You're In For the sake of clarity, I will introduce some new terminology. When you are acquiring career capital in a field, you can imagine that you are acquiring this capital in a specific type of career capital market. There are two types of these markets: winner-take-all and auction. In a winner-take-all market, there is only one type of career capital available, and lots of different people competing for it. — Cal Newport

Sometimes when I'm swimming, I think that maybe someday I'll put my red Speedo up for auction. Or maybe I'll donate it to the Smithsonian. They can stuff it with two plums and a gherkin and put it on display. — David Duchovny

Auction houses run a rigged game. They know exactly how many people will be bidding on a work and exactly who they are. In a gallery, works of art need only one person who wants to pay for them. — Jerry Saltz

It takes no more research than a trip to almost any public library or college to show the incredibly lopsided coverage of slavery in the United States or in the Western Hemisphere, as compared to the meager writings on even larger number of Africans enslaved in the Islamic countries of the Middle East and North Africa, not to mention the vast numbers of Europeans also enslaved in centuries past in the Islamic world and within Europe itself. At least a million Europeans were enslaved by North African pirates alone from 1500 to 1800, and some Europeans slaves were still being sold on the auction blocks in the Egypt, years after the Emancipation Proclamation freed blacks in the United States. — Thomas Sowell

Escape procedures, however, were in full force. Some people, in a frenzy of antipathy and boredom, were drinking themselves into extreme approximations of longing to be together. Exchanging phone numbers, demanding to have lunch, proposing to share an apartment - the escalations of fellowship had the air of a terminal auction, a fierce adult version of slapjack, a bill-payer loan from a finance company, an attempt to buy with one grand convivial debt, to be paid in future, an exit from each other's company at that instant. — Renata Adler

The Garden trapped me like an animal. The Governess sold me like livestock at an auction. And the mayor and his family would have made me their whore. I am shaking with rage. — Kristen Simmons

My first crime novel, "Wild Horses," sold at auction, and that changed my life at an ideal time. — Brian Hodge

They examine me like I'm a cow at a 4-H auction. I try not to moo. — Jeri Smith-Ready

This was why he came back for me. This was why he wanted me and not some broken little girl he could pick up at auction. He wanted me because I was alive. Because I felt. Because the pain was etched on my face every time he won. And because he loved fucking with me in every possible way. — Devon Ashley

attend the auction - curators — Nicholas Sparks

The sculptor Frosty Myers and I met when we were bidding against each other at an auction. He's an eccentric, a liberal with a collection of rifles, and his stuff is big art. We share a love of tractors. I'm trading him one for a piece of art. — Mark Ruffalo

The state - or, to make matters more concrete, the government - consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office. Their principal device to that end is to search out groups who pant and pine for something they can't get, and to promise to give it to them. Nine times out of ten that promise is worth nothing. The tenth time it is made good by looting 'A' to satisfy 'B'. In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is a sort of advanced auction on stolen goods. — H.L. Mencken

I'm keeping a list of Mr. Wrongs going for you. This one might not make it to the weekend's auction."
"Stop," said another woman.
"I'm just kidding."
"I still vote we strip him down." This was a third woman.
Wait. Three women? Had he died and gone to orgy heaven? Awake now, Ty took stock. He wasn't dead. And he had no idea who the fuck Mr. Wrong was, but he was very much "going to make it." He was stuffed in the back of a car, a small car, his bad leg cramping like a son-of-a-bitch. His head was pillowed on ... he shifted to try to figure it out, and pain lanced straight through his eyeballs. He licked dry lips and tried to focus. "I'm okay."
"Good," one of them repeated with humor. "He's fine, he's okay. He's also bleeding like a stuck pig. Men are ridiculous."
-Ty and the Chocoholics ladies — Jill Shalvis

People were doing business with one another through the Internet already, through bulletin boards. But on the Web, we could make it interactive, we could create an auction, we could create a real marketplace. And that's really what triggered my imagination, if you will, and that's what I did. — Pierre Omidyar

My first car, I got it in an auction at my temple. It was an '86 Volvo that I got for 500 bucks, and then wound up throwing $10,000 into the stereo system and put TVs in the foot rests. It was the most ridiculous Volvo you'd ever seen, but I had never had money before and I was out of my mind. — Shia Labeouf

When the leaders choose to make themselves bidders at an auction of popularity, their talents, in the construction of the state, will be of no service. They will become flatterers instead of legislators; the instruments, not the guides, of the people. — Edmund Burke

A job interview is a competition won by those who are qualified the most, and, those who are willing to be payed the least. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

That Europe is nothin' on earth but a great big auction, that's all it is, that bunch of old worn-out places, it's just a big fire-sale, the whole rutten thing. — Tennessee Williams

My first ball I ever got from a Big League player I actually got to purchase in Dodger Stadium in a silent auction, was Reggie Jackson. — Pedro Martinez

If you default on your Visa bill, nobody comes to repossess your refrigerator or auction off your shoes. The biggest penalty you'll face is trouble getting future credit. — Virginia Postrel

Well the open-outcry auction is just made to turn the brain into mush: you've got social proof, the other guy is bidding, you get reciprocation tendency, you get deprival super-reaction syndrome, the thing is going away ... I mean it just absolutely is designed to manipulate people into idiotic behavior. — Charlie Munger

It is not the time to put school districts up for auction. Now is the time to galvanize them into action. — Andy Hargreaves

Of all the priceless objects left behind, this is what we rescue. These artifacts. Memory cues. Useless souvenirs. Nothing you could auction. The scars left from happiness. — Chuck Palahniuk

God help us if we ever take the theater out of the auction business or anything else. It would be an awfully boring world. — A. Alfred Taubman

The best works do not necessarily get to auction. I like to draw, so maybe I give you a little drawing. And then eventually it ends up at auction. And then critics say, 'Oh, that's a bad drawing!' Well, I didn't say it was so wonderful. — Marlene Dumas

I love writing in longhand. Writing in longhand, I think, is a marvelous thing to do for a writer these days. If you have a notebook and a nice pen you can go off somewhere, you can write that's solar powered. You can drop it or get it wet and pretty much all of your work will continue to be there. If you suddenly decide to look up a word or check a reference you will not look up four hours later, blinking, finding yourself somehow in the middle of an Ebay auction you never had any plans to be part of. — Neil Gaiman

Absurd. It was absurd to think that someone like that could have any power over him. Yet she would, if she won the auction.
He wanted her to. The thought swept Arin with a merciless, ugly joy. He'd never seen her before, but he guessed who she was: Lady Kestrel, General Trajan's daughter.
The crowd heard her bid. And at once it seemed that Arin was worth something after all. — Marie Rutkoski

In all fairness to the auction companies ? most companies are not car experts, they are marketers. I caution buyers to make sure that they have done their homework before they raise their hand and not after. — Mark Hyman, M.D.

Nothing will teach you more about perceived value than taking something with literally no value and selling it in the auction format. It teaches you the beauty and power of presentation, and how you can make magic out of nothing. — Sophia Amoruso

The lesson here, and my advice for other developers, is to find a way that you can quantify for people what your product is worth. We were leery to do it ourselves, but being near Vetro when they did, the auction was a good technique for that. No one wants to be first, and the auction proved to people that others were buying and gave them that boost of confidence they needed. — Bob Horner

The book of the moment often has immense vogue, while the book of the age, which comes in its company from the press, lies unnoticed; but the great book has its revenge. It lives to see its contemporary pushed up shelf by shelf until it finds its final resting-place in the garret or the auction room. — Hamilton Wright Mabie

There was a large notice in black and red hung on the gate, stating that on June the Twenty-second Messrs Grubb, Grubb, and Burrowes would sell by auction the effects of the late Bilbo Baggins Esquire, of Bag-End, Underhill, Hobbiton. — J.R.R. Tolkien

I talked to Larry the Cable Guy the other day. Larry's made more money than 10 people should ever make in a lifetime. He was excited because he'd gone over to the livestock auction and bought 20 new feeder pigs. — Jeff Foxworthy

There is a kind of laughter people laugh at public events, as if a joke were a charity auction and they want to be seen to be bidding. — William McIlvanney

I hadn't known my dad could get so competitive over an auction. It was
probably a good thing he hadn't yet discovered eBay. — Piper Banks

War may be an auction for countries. For soldiers it's a lottery. — David Mitchell

I don't pay attention to auction prices. Nothing interests me less. One of the benefits of not being an artist is I don't have to navigate the social hierarchies of the art world as a person of desire. I don't need anything. I live in a different way. — Rachel Kushner

The auction houses seemed not as dull as their financial counterparts on Wall Street, where parents of daughters imagined glass celings and bottom patting. — Steve Martin

A tipping point is invisible, as we just saw in Greece. In most situations, everything appears fine until it's not fine, until, for example, no one shows up at a Treasury auction. — Seth Klarman

As a part of their conditioning, women voluntarily prostitute themselves into the auction and groom themselves toward the highest exchange. — Bryant McGill

Some prescient American collectors, including Vicki and Kent Logan and Mera and Donald Rubell, began collecting Chinese art before 2000 with a genuine passion, but as the auction prices exploded everyone was beating a path to the galleries and artist studios in China. It became the 'China thing.' — Arne Glimcher

You notice Mr. Hollywood noticing you at the auction this morning? Because I did. I also noticed you noticing him. — Jessica R. Patch

The designer of my Emmy gown is donating my gown to the charity for an auction. — Maria Menounos

Notwithstanding my grandmother's long and faithful service to her owners, not one of her children escaped the auction block. These God-breathing machines are no more, in the sight of their masters, than the cotton they plant, or the horses they tend. — Harriet Ann Jacobs

The center was not holding. It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public-auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misplaced even the four-letter words they scrawled. It was a country in which families routinely disappeared, trailing bad checks and repossession papers. Adolescents drifted from city to torn city, sloughing off both the past and the future as snakes shed their skins, children who were never taught and would never now learn the games that had held the society together. People were missing. Children were missing. Parents were missing. Those left behind filed desultory missing- persons reports, then moved on themselves. — Joan Didion

One of the questions that I hear over and over and over is, 'What do we do with all these paintings we do on television?' Most of these paintings are donated to PBS stations across the country. They auction them off, and they make a happy buck with 'em. — Bob Ross

A collector recently bought at public auction, in London, for one hundred and fifty-seven guineas, an autograph of Shakespeare; but for nothing a school-boy can read Hamlet and can detect secrets of highest concernment yet unpublished therein. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

A saboteur in the house of art and a comedienne in the house of art theory, Lawler has spent three decades documenting the secret life of art. Functioning as a kind of one-woman CSI unit, she has photographed pictures and objects in collectors' homes, in galleries, on the walls of auction houses, and off the walls, in museum storage. — Jerry Saltz

His five feet three rested angular on the folding chair, a body small, well-wrought and somehow precious, as if it were the forgotten creation of any goldsmith - even Cellini - shrouded now in dark serge and waiting to be put up for auction. — Thomas Pynchon

Plutocracy too long tolerated leaves democracy on the auction block, subject to the highest bidder. — Bill Moyers

Can you imagine a demon auction? Serial killer going once ... twice ... sold to the drama queen at the corner. — P.C. Cast

Morris wondered what domestic catastrophe would make a man sell even the plaster gnomes from his garden.It was a horrid piece of evidence for mutability; Mutability, goddess of the auction room, dusty-fingered Mutability, the old-age pensioner goddess. And she ruled over the casserole containing the half-empty packet of sugar no one would ever finish, now; and the dropsical white tea-pot with the brown tidemark left in by years of the-making by dead women in flowered aprons ( withered and dead, all the chintz flowers); over all the odd, disjointed fragments of other people's lives. — Angela Carter

This isn't like an auction, right? You guys aren't going to take it away? — Jennifer Lawrence

If you didn't auction the [CO2] permits, it would represent the largest corporate welfare program that has ever been enacted in the history of the United States. All of the evidence is that what would occur is that corporate profits would increase by approximately the value of the permits. — Peter R. Orszag

The right-of-centre parties still often compete with left-of-centre ones to proclaim their attachment to all the main programmes of spending, particularly spending on social services of one kind or another. But this foolish as well as muddled. It is foolish because left-of-centre parties will always be able to outbid right-of-centre ones in this auction - after all, that is why they are on the left in the first place. The muddle arises because once we concede that public spending and taxation are than a necessary evil we have lost sight of the core values of freedom. — Margaret Thatcher

Sultan Beyazid considered his father's art collection decadent and ordered it sold at auction. — Stephen Kinzer

I couldn't believe I'd so completely lost track of time, but I'd had monsters to fight, a police interrogation to deal with, a graveyard to search, my dad to send home, a mobster's brother's death to avert, a new job to learn, and an illegal auction to attend. It was a wonder I got anything done, really. — Karen Marie Moning

An election is nothing more than the advanced auction of stolen goods. — Ambrose Bierce

On the farm, I had chores. I had a calf. We had a herd of cattle in the pasture. We'd go and get me a calf at a cow auction with Amish people, which I would raise. I gave it a bottle every day, in this cute little coop, like a giant dog coop almost. I've always been a big animal person. — Krysten Ritter

It's the greatest game I ever saw. You can't lose. Everybody buys to sell and nobody buys to keep. What's worrying me is who is going to be the last owner. It's just like an auction; the only one stuck is the last one. — Will Rogers

One day,' was the dark reply, 'I will find the Ripper, and you will prove it with your life.'
'I hope that is not a threat against my person, sir, verily I do.' The auctioneer was all of a quiver. 'I shall not endure that sort of talk in my wife's very own auction house, sir. Judith would never have allowed such wanton verbal abuse, sir.'
'Where's you wife's spirit?' a medium shouted. 'Shall we auction her off, too?'
Didion purpled like a bruise. You knew things were getting serious when Didion Waite ran out of sirs. — Samantha Shannon

I started collecting in the late 1990s. My first purchase was from an auction, a scroll by Dong Qichang, from the early 16th century, the late Ming Dynasty. — Jerry Yang

Every telecomm company is as big a corporate welfare bum as you could ask for. Try to imagine what it would cost at market rates to go around to every house in every town in every country and pay for the right to block traffic and dig up roads and erect poles and string wires and pierce every home with cabling. The regulatory fiat that allows these companies to get their networks up and running is worth hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of dollars.
If phone companies want to operate in the "free market," then let them: the FCC could give them 60 days to get all their rotten copper out of our dirt, or we'll buy it from them at the going scrappage rates. Then, let's hold an auction for the right to be the next big telecomm company, on one condition: in exchange for using the public's rights-of-way, you have to agree to connect us to the people we want to talk to, and vice-versa, as quickly and efficiently as you can. — Cory Doctorow

There was a silence, and I looked at Laura - really looked at her - and had the sudden impression that I was having dinner with a simulacrum, a knockoff. I felt like the man who buys the box of genuine wartime memorabilia at auction and brings it home to discover, under the first layer, piles and piles of shredded newspaper. — Paul Murray

Publication - is the auction of the mind ... — Emily Dickinson

When you buy a company at an auction, and you are committing yourself to pay some $300 million to the state because it was a privatization deal, and you don't pay it, is it OK? Isn't it something that deserves court procedures? — Sergei Lavrov

Once they witnessed one of his painting sold at auction for $100,000. And asked how you do it, he said, 'I feel as a horse must feel when the beautiful cup is given to the jockey.' — Edgar Degas

Every man that tried to destroy the Government, every man that shot at the holy flag in heaven, every man that starved our soldiers ... every man that wanted to burn the negro, every one that wanted to scatter yellow fever in the North, every man that opposed human liberty, that regarded the auction-block as an altar and the howling of the bloodhound as the music of the Union, every man who wept over the corpse of slavery, that thought lashes on the naked back were a legal tender for labour performed, every one willing to rob a mother of her child - every solitary one was a Democrat. — Robert Green Ingersoll

My assistant says I'm an eBay auction waiting to happen. I have a very large collection of T-shirts ... about 4,000 now. Maybe I'll pillage it someday. I have resisted the offers to do a line of T-shirts. — Bruce Vilanch

What I do know is, in little more than 30 years, we have gone from a nation where the "quiet enjoyment" of one's private property was a sacred right, to a day when the so-called property "owner" faces a hovering hoard of taxmen and regulators threatening to lien, foreclose, and "go to auction" at the first sign of private defiance of their collective will ... a relationship between government and private property rights which my dictionary defines as "fascism." — Vin Suprynowicz

We're more familiar with what economists call an English auction - prices start low and rise as people bid. However, there is also the Dutch auction, where prices start high and go lower until somebody bites. Movies are sold to the audience via a very slow Dutch auction, where each phase between price drops can last weeks or months. — Nathan Myhrvold

The results speak for themselves: Businesses that competitively sourced service contracts saved an average of about 22 percent. Even more impressive - nearly every e-auction delivered cost savings. — Brian Miller