Sportacus glossary

1. Words

Bidding is an offer (often competitive) of setting a price one is willing to pay for something. A price offer is called a BID. The term is used in context of auctions.

"Bidding up" means rising a price for an item by a series of rising bids. It may be unlawful, if done by a group of persons with an interest in raising the price. In traditional auctions, bidding up is a natural course of events. Since 1990s, with the emergence of online auctions, reverse auctions gained popularity, in which the traditional roles of buyers and sellers are reversed, and the goal of bidding is to drive the price down, similar to bid shopping practice of selecting a contractor to do a job.

A bid price is a price offered by a buyer/bidder when he buys a good, usually referred to as simply the "bid".

In bid and ask, the bid price stands in contrast to the ask price or "offer", and the difference between the two is called the bid/offer spread.

BIN or BuyItNow Auction. The seller gives you the opportunity to purchase the item right away without waiting for an online auction to end.

-Fixed price listings -

BIN (BuyItNow) price is the Price at witch the item is sold immediately. This means in theory if one buyer agrees to pay this price he is automatically the winner.

Buy It Now can be very useful to shorten auction time. Once chosen, the BIN Buyer becomes the winner and the auction closes.

Proxy Bidding is an implementation of an English second-price auction, in which the winning bidder pays the price of the second-highest bid plus a defined increment. It differs from a Vickrey auction in that bids are not sealed; the "current highest bid" (defined as second-highest bid plus bid increment) is always displayed. In a standard first-price English auction the winner pays the amount of their bid, regardless of competitors' bids, and it is therefore desirable to place a bid that exceeds the current highest bid by the smallest possible increment. Under proxy bidding, however, the price paid is determined only by competitors' bids and not by the amount of the new bid, and so there is no economically rational incentive to place a bid below the amount one is willing to pay, or to place multiple increasing bids. An "economically rational" bidder will therefore bid the maximum amount they are willing to pay on their first bid, and never raise their bid.

A "Watchlist" is a feature on websites that allow a user to watch, track, or see current activity of, a list of favorite pages.

2. Symbols