The decision-maker started out with 360 points, and every time the other bidder upped the ante by 40 points, the decision-maker followed suit.
But if you have, for example, a technical piece of equipment that is very specialised, it is worth offering as a Buy It Now for two months, because the chance of multiple bidders upping the offer is slim.
Correspondence and unfinished manuscripts, largely undisturbed since Steinbeck's death in 1968, will be broken up into 52 lots at Bloomsbury unless a single bidder steps up in advance to pay at least $200,000 for the whole archive.
The phone bidder hung up.
One bidder snapped up a Fiat 500 for just £193.
A telephone bidder ended up paying $18.5 million for it, or $20.8 million with fees.
Another telephone bidder snapped up an ink drawing by Guston from around 1953.
Whichever bidder comes up with the contract, some fear that the resulting bitterness could be challenged in the courts.
The same bidder snapped up one of Cy Twombly's gray paintings, "Untitled (Bolsena)," from 1969, which was being sold by Karsten Greve, the Paris dealer.
SELLING VLAMINCK AND 'LIZ' In 1994, when the auction market was in the doldrums, one savvy telephone bidder snapped up "Paysage de Banlieue," a colorful Fauvist Vlaminck landscape from 1905-06, at Christie's in New York for $6.8 million.
A Hong Kong bidder snatched up the 16.08-carat 16.08-caratne and dubbed it "The Sweet Josephine" – kicking off a week of auctions that could see anotherareloured diamond set a new world record.
