Word: auction
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...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...
...complex laws of economics, eBay spreads like a virus. There are few geographic restrictions: Australian, Austrian, British, Canadian, French, German, Irish, Italian, Japanese, New Zealand and Swiss versions of the website are available. There are practically no legal restrictions, especially since a San Francisco court recently declared the auction service could not be held responsible for pirated or bootlegged music sold on its site (Napster should be so lucky). Its name has entered the global lexicon: "I bet you'll find that on eBay" has become the punch line to a thousand jokes. For the media, eBay is a bottomless...
Which helps explain why corporations from IBM to General Motors are falling over themselves to do deals with the Web auction giant. Disney auctioned off the "D" from the original Disneyland sign. Technology titan Sun Microsystems sold server hardware on the site with million-dollar starting prices. Yet despite such big-league partnerships, it's still the little guy that counts. Unlike your local mall, eBay would not survive for a second without mom and pop operations. Its entire success is predicated on extreme diversity. And you can forget about the pernicious influence of Madison Avenue. In this hypermodern arena...