A Snapshot of Auction

	楊杏望, 林駿易, 范凯隸
	A Snapshot of Auction: an Art of Shopping
	Auction is a new means that people use to quickly sell an item compared to traditional marketing. As a major difference distinguishing auction from traditional marketing, auction pushes up the price. In some cases, prices are higher than the true value of the item. On the other hand, auction is also utilized to help determine an item’s market value.
	The first auction was taken place in Babylon in around 500 B.C. But these auctions were not quite the same as the modern auctions we might think of. In 500 B.C., Babylonians auctioned women as goods. These good-looking woken might be sold at a good price whereas ugly women were offered to pay their own dowry. As for nowadays, famous auction houses are e-Bay, Sotheby’s and Christie’s, the three world-class auctions that we are familiar with. The last two are traditional auction houses while e-Bay is the largest word-wide online auction site that two people of f ten once a while use its services. Speaking of online auction, no one can forget e-Bay the largest online auction network. On the e-Bay, as biggest as it can be even carriers are sold. What else would you expect to find on e-Bay? Everything is possible! It could be an island or even a small country.
	However, we re more interested in what confers the “booming auction industry”. We shall discuss the power the industry survives and thrives among the tough market competition in addition to the advantages it possesses over traditional marketing. First, auctions are not fined by physical limitation like time and geographical constraint. For instance, e-Bay offers a 2417 such services that both traditional marketing and auctions cannot compete. Second, taking all these to the internet guarantees an extensive and continued exposure to myriads of sellers and bidders. Finally, because of such tremendous amounts of sellers and bidders as well as spiral operations, auctions either traditional or online attract more and more people. They accept biddings, not only on precious antiques, jewelry, artificates, and so on but also government public construction projects, stocks, bonds, mines, and crops. Various items are sold worldwide. However, some people focus on neither daily commodity nor usual items. On the contrary, they’re bizarre items such as submarines, carriers, or even some famous people’s relics or women’s wombs.
	In this section, we introduced few kinds of auctions that may not have even crossed your mind. But they are somehow in one way or another related to our lives. First, there are governmental auction held just for the license to log wood or to consume electricity in large consumption usually by metal-refining factories. Apart from this, there is also one kind of auction in which the items sold are segments of frequencies. Radio companies submit bids to purchase a license that allows them to broadcast over certain electromagnetic frequencies such as AM, FM, or short wave.
	How are auctions conducted to invite bidding? There are generally four ways via which one can sell an item. They are the English and Dutch ways, procurement auction, and sealed price auction, respectively. The English and Dutch auctions are simply two reversed versions of each other. In an English auction, bids are made progressively higher bids whereas Dutch auction works in a descending fashion from high bids to lower bids. The procurement auction is an opposite version to English and Dutch auctions because the roles of seller an bidder are reversed. In a typical procurement auction, sellers provide successively lower prices for the bidders to choose. All in all, auction becomes more and more convenient. Almost anything you want to buy can be found in auction. Auction applies to every class of people. From the young to the old or the poor to the rich, there must be something suitable in auction. Since auction is worldwide, you can also buy things overseas. So the merchandises you can buy are various. There is one benefit that traditional marketing never has. It is that you can offer the price by your own will, which means the price you pay is the reasonable price since it is your own bid.

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