Word: auctioner
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Vickrey, 82, designed a novel auction method in which bids are sealed and the winner pays what the second-highest bidder offered; a version of this is used by the U.S. Treasury to sell notes. Vickrey also urged railways and utilities to prevent congestion by charging peak rates at the busiest times of day, a practice that has now become routine...
...access to different information. Interested in practical applications, like the efficient use of public transport, Vickrey was able to convince the Washington D.C. subway system (but not New York's) to use a progressive fare system, which charges more for longer trips. He also left his mark on the auction houses of the world, where a sealed bid "Vickrey auction" has the highest bidder only paying the next-highest offer. Vickrey earned a master's in economics from Columbia in 1937 and a doctorate in 1948. After winning the prize, he was invigorated, telling journalists "Forty-five years...
...cutthroat world of celebrity teddy-bear auctioning, a lot depends on who's wielding the hammer. More people probably want to cuddle up to Elle Macpherson than to ROSIE O'DONNELL, but at an auction for the Children's Safety Project at New York City's Greenwich House, which O'Donnell co-gaveled with KEVIN SPACEY, the talk-show host's bears sold for $5,800, more than 20 times what the model's fetched. (Rosie threw in a guest spot on her show.) Singer Natalie Merchant's personally made bears garnered less than Muhammad Ali's or Al Pacino...
...ceremony was interrupted by a live auction in which plaster casts of the left foot of Lipscomb, Glashow and Herschbach sold for $11, $15 and $30 respectively...
...promising political career, as it has been based up to now almost completely on the old sex appeal." How quaint that fear seems now, at a time when the desire to own third-rate objects that Kennedy and his wife Jackie once merely touched can set off a frenzied auction--at a time, that is, when the hunger for all things Kennedy appears ever unsated. Whatever other image problems the assorted Kennedys have battled over the years, loss of the old sex appeal has not been...