n. (1) An auction having several of the same item up for
bid at once, with a minimum
bid. Bidding starts with
people offering a fixed price at or above the minimum for a certain number of, or all of, the items available. Highest offered price wins, regardless of how many items were
bid on by that bidder, and winners then descend by final offered price.
A feature
unique to this style of auction is that, if a lower-bidding participant
bid for
x items, but due to higher-bidding winners could only buy fewer than x, he has the right to back out and purchase none at all.
(2) a form of auction similar to the above, once but no longer held on eBay, in which the same rules were generally followed, with rules for bid times and final winning prices calculated slightly differently.
They had
ten signed NFL footballs up at the stadium that they were dutch auctioning off for
charity- one guy got 5, one got 2, and I got 3 and
paid the least!
