Word: auction
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...observers such tactics smack of price-fixing, market discrimination and possible violation of antitrust law: if the player does not like the U.S. team negotiating the deal, his only recourse is to stay in Japan for another year. Nomo's American-based agent Don Nomura called it a "slave auction." The union, true to form, failed to file suit. Explained Toru Matsubara, secretary-general of the Japanese Baseball Players Association: "Trials last forever here." Japan was free to sell off its best talent. And there was little the fan could do. As a disgusted Tamaki creatively put it, "It makes...
...Nakamura owns more than 100 of the robots, which he carefully displays in a glass case at his parents' Los Angeles home. When Internet auction fever hit last year, the prices of the rarest robots - the $500-range machines intact in original box and Styrofoam - quadrupled, so Nakamura took a deep breath and hopped on a plane to Japan to hunt out the best deals. "It was the first time I'd traveled somewhere just to fulfill my toy fetish," he says of his trips down narrow Tokyo alleyways to check out tiny toy-shops. "But Japan is a mecca...
...these giant gambles," says Ken Binmore, a University College London economist who helped design the British auction. "If 3G is worth anything, it is going to be worth immense amounts, but who knows if it will be worth anything?" Binmore - who is delighted with how the auction turned out for British taxpayers - adds that the telecom operators understood this risk going in. If anything, the technological prospects for 3G were even more doubtful a year ago. The big difference between then and now isn't the technology. It's the NASDAQ...
...real devil appeared at the crossroads, in the form of Jeff Probst. This wasn't contract time yet, mind you - just a getting-to-know-you, involving some of Old Scratch's favorite sins: greed and gluttony. For the Reward Challenge, Probst grabbed his gavel and held a food auction...
...with sellers receiving an all-important democratic rating based on how often they have delivered the goods as promised by the agreed-upon date. When suspect wares - like supposed organ sales - slip unseen into the massive mElange, it isn't eBay staffers who spot them first - it's the auctioneers, vigilantly policing their own neighborhood. More controversially, veteran buyers employ special software that helps them jump in and snap up items in the last seconds of an auction. But mostly the instinctive acquisitiveness of the denizens forms the kind of lasting bonds that are too often lacking in off-line...