Auction

Auction is a described as buying and selling goods and/or services by offering them for sale by bid offers, and then selling the asset to the winning bidder.

There are many variations on the auction theme, such as: time limits, minimum or maximum limits on bid prices, and special rules for determining the winning bidder(s) and sale price(s).

Participants in an auction may or may not know the identities or actions of other participants. Depending on the auction, bidders may participate in person or remotely through a variety of means, including telephone and the internet. The seller usually pays a commission to the auctioneer or auction company based on a percentage of the final sale price.

Auctions are publicly and privately seen in several contexts and almost anything can be sold at auction. Some typical auction arenas include the following:

• Farm clearing sale
• Grass-fed cattle at auction
• Wool buyers' room at a wool auction
• Sale of collectibles such as stamps, coins, classic cars, fine art, and luxury real estate
• Wine auction 
• All types of real property including residential and commercial real estate, farms, vacant lots and land.
• Consumer second-hand goods of all kinds, particularly farm (equipment) and house clearances and online auctions.
• Industrial machinery, both surplus or through insolvency.
• Commodities auctions, like the fish wholesale auctions
• Livestock auctions where sheep, cattle, pigs and other livestock are sold
• Wool auctions where international agents purchase lots of wool
• Thoroughbred horses, where yearling horses and other bloodstock are auctioned.
• Legal contexts where forced auctions occur

Although less publicly visible, the most economically important auctions are the commodities auctions in which the bidders are businesses even up to corporation level. Examples of this type of auction include:

Sales of businesses

• Spectrum auctions, in which companies purchase licenses to use portions of the electromagnetic spectrum for communications (e.g., mobile phone networks)
• Private electronic markets using combinatorial auction techniques to continuously sell commodities (coal, iron ore, grain, water...) to a pre-qualified group of buyers (based on price and non-price factors)
• Timber auctions, in which companies purchase licenses to log on government land
• Timber allocation auctions, in which companies purchase timber directly from the government Forest Auctions
• Electricity auctions, in which large-scale generators and consumers of electricity bid on generating contracts
• Environmental auctions, in which companies bid for licenses to avoid being required to decrease their environmental impact
• Debt auctions, in which governments sell debt instruments, such as bonds, to investors. The auction is usually sealed and the uniform price paid by the investors is typically the best non-winning bid. In most cases, investors can also place so called non-competitive bids, which indicates an interest to purchase the debt instrument at the resulting price, whatever it may be
• Auto auctions, in which car dealers purchase used vehicles to retail to the public.

Sources: Wikipedia

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