History Main / Auction

* ''Series/{{CSINY}}'''s episode "Yahrzeit" opens with a murder during an auction. As the case evolves, one of the pieces being offered is discovered to have been stolen from a Jewish family during the Holocaust.

* ''Radio/OurMissBrooks'': In "The Auction", [[SoundToScreenAdaptation a radio episode remade for television]], Madison High School holds an auction to raise funds for children's playground equipment. A local philanthropist even donates an entire house full of furniture. HilarityEnsues when DumbJock Stretch Snodgrass mixes up addresses, and Miss Brooks inadvertently auctions off Mr. Conklin's furniture instead:

* ''Radio/OurMissBrooks'': In "The Auction", [[SoundToScreenAdaptation a radio episode remade for television]], Madison High School holds an auction to raise funds for children's playground equipment. A local philanthropist even donates an entire house full of furniture. HilarityEnsues when DumbJock Stretch Snodgrass mixes up addresses, and Miss Brooks inadvertently auctions off Mr. Conklin's furniture instead:

* ''Website/FamilyGuyFanon'': In "Do and Die", after Peter's job cancels the planned Adam West figures they made to coincide with him becoming mayor due to Adam West's decline in popularity due to Lois, Peter mentions how he could maybe pawn his figure he was able to take home on eBay, before Brian destroys it.

* The 2019 Food Network game show "Supermarket Stakeout" has four cooks competing for $10,000. They have $500 to start the show, but that must last three rounds (as in the "Budget Battle"-themed episodes of "Guy's Grocery Games" where they only have a beginning amount which must last the whole show). To get the groceries from which they must get what they need to cook, the cooks must buy them off of shoppers who had already paid for them, offering to pay above what was spent. If two or more see a shopper and want what they have, they go into an auction to see who can make a better offer for the groceries.

* ''Series/{{Castle}}''; in "The Last Call", the victim of the week discovered a stash of Mayor Beau James Walker's legendary (and highly expensive) whisky and tried to cut a deal with an auction house; the head of the auction house ends up killing him to claim the whiskey for himself. Castle, Beckett, Esposito and Ryan crash one of his auctions to quietly make him aware that he's busted.

* ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyVI'' has an auction house in Jidoor. There are some items that you can't win, such as a talking chocobo, but the items you can get include two espers (Golem and Zona Seeker) and some rare relics.
* Hanging around the Treno auction house in ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyIX'' is the only way to find the Dark Matter, which can be equipped to allow casting one of the most powerful summon spells in the game (or tossed at an enemy to be used as a one-shot).
* {{MMORPG}}s like ''VideoGame/WorldOfWarcraft'' even have interactive player-versus-player auction houses.

* ''[[VideoGame/{{Forza}} Forza Motorsport]]'' has the Auction House, where players can put their cars up for sale on auctions. The Auction House is a great place to get neat painted cars or specially tuned, limited-edition cars made by well-known tuners. Players putting a car up for auction set how much the initial price is, the "Buyout" price (like the "Buy Now" option on eBay), and the time of the auction. Players bidding will bid in pre-set increments, and in the final 2 minutes of an auction, every bid will reset the clock to 2 minutes remaining, preventing bid sniping.
* Chances are good that you are going to participate in one of these in ''VideoGame/FortuneStreet''. If a player is forced to sell their property back to the bank, the bank will go into an auction with the three non-sellers, which usually ends up being a cheaper way to acquire the property than trying to buy out that property directly...that is, if you win.
* Early ''Tycoon'' style game ''Dino Park Tycoon'' has auctions enabled--you could get a 'slightly used' dinosaur for relatively cheap, or put up one of your own dinos for sale. Most notably, the auction was a GameBreaker in the DOS release--there was a way to force the MadScientist in the audience to constantly increase the bid on the current dinosaur up for sale, [[ArtificialStupidity even if he was bidding over himself]]. If you used this glitch when ''your'' dinosaur came up on the block, you could eventually force the computer-controlled scientist to overpay for a dinosaur by tens of thousands of dollars and pass most of that money on to you...provided you had both the patience to wait through the very slow early bidding process as well as the restraint to not get greedy with the glitch and trigger an underflow that would roll the price back down to the lowest possible starting bid. Subsequent ''Tycoon'' games from other developers excluded auctions after this.
* In ''[[VideoGame/{{Drakensang}} Drakensang 2: River of Time]]'' there is a mini-quest where a river sprite is auctioned off. The player can trry to outbid the others, scare the original seller before the auction into giving the sprite up or scare the buyer.

* ''[[VideoGame/LateShift Late Shift]]'' features one in the first stage of the heist for a Ming dynasty porcelain rice bowl.
* ''VideoGame/BarnFinders'': Auctions are held down at the Bridge Storage garage. You can go there to collect stuff to fix up at sell at your pawn shop.

* ''WesternAnimation/RalphBreaksTheInternet'': Ralph and Vanellope go to Website/EBay to get a new steering wheel for ''Sugar Rush''. In the Internet, Website/EBay is depicted like an actual auction house.

* ''[[VideoGame/{{Forza}} Forza Motorsport]]'' has the Auction House, where players can put their cars up for sale on auctions. The Auction House is a great place to get neat painted cars or specially tuned, limited-edition cars made by well-known tuners. Players putting a car up for auction set how much the initial price is, the "Buyout" price (like the "Buy Now" option on Website/EBay), and the time of the auction. Players bidding will bid in pre-set increments, and in the final 2 minutes of an auction, every bid will reset the clock to 2 minutes remaining, preventing bid sniping.

** In another episode, they visit the futuristic Website/EBay where the Milky Way Galaxy is auctioned off:

* Website/EBay is now synonymous with online auctions, although it's not the only one.

* An auction for land parcels in Florida is a key plot element in ''Film/The Cocoanuts''.

* This is what is supposed to be done to properties that players do not outright purchase when they land on an unowned space in ''TabletopGame/{{Monopoly}}'' -- the PopularGameVariant of leaving it unpurchased is a major contributor to the marathon sessions the game can be notorious for. Many have taken up that house rule because auctions have a tendency to degenerate into +$1 pissing contests, which can be easily fixed with another house rule that bids have to be at least, say, $5 or $10 above the previous one. Another less common house rule has the unowned property immediately go to auction when landed on with no possibility to purchase it at face value. Auctions are also supposed to happen if several players want to build more houses or hotels at once than there are left in the bank (most players just go by "first come, first served" basis when that happens) or when a player goes bankrupt against the bank to redistribute their properties (since this can get tedious fast, they are often simply put back up for sale). Many of the game's video game adaptations retain this house rule.

* ''Anime/LastExile'': while Claus and Lavie are participating in an air race, Captain Alex Rowe attends an auction and causes a stir--he opens with a 10,000,000 Claudia bid for an artifact, where the reserve price was only 5,000,000. [[spoiler: The bidding goes up to 50 ''billion'', and only stops because Alex' opponent puts a gun to his head to keep him from running the price up further.]]

* This is what is supposed to be done to properties that players do not outright purchase when they land on an unowned space in ''TabletopGame/{{Monopoly}}'' -- the common HouseRule of leaving it unpurchased is a major contributor to the marathon sessions the game can be notorious for. Many have taken up that house rule because auctions have a tendency to degenerate into +$1 pissing contests, which can be easily fixed with another house rule that bids have to be at least, say, $5 or $10 above the previous one. Another less common house rule has the unowned property immediately go to auction when landed on with no possibility to purchase it at face value. Auctions are also supposed to happen if several players want to build more houses or hotels at once than there are left in the bank (most players just go by "first come, first served" basis when that happens) or when a player goes bankrupt against the bank to redistribute their properties (since this can get tedious fast, they are often simply put back up for sale). Many of the game's video game adaptations retain this house rule.

* ''Series/OnlyFoolsAndHorses'': In "Time On Our Hands", the Trotter brothers discover that a pocket watch among the junk in their garage is actually incredibly rare and valuable. They let it go to auction and it eventually sells for ''£6 million''. Both brother FaintInShock as the total climbs higher and higher.

--->'''Miss Brooks''': [[OhCrap Mr. Conklin . . . it was your house!]] . . . Well, there's only one way to settle this. Gather round, folks, gather round. What am I bid for me and Stretch Snodgrass?

* ''Series/TheTenthKingdom'' had one with the MagicMirror at stake.

* The protagonists of ''Film/MouseHunt'' try to sell their mansion in one.
* In the film ''Film/{{Octopussy}}'', Film/JamesBond attended an auction at Sotheby's for a Faberge egg. Besides driving up the price to see how badly the bad guy wanted it, he also manages to palm the thing and substitute a fake. This section of the film is based on the short story "[[Literature/OctopussyAndTheLivingDaylights The Property of a Lady]]", which has a somewhat different outcome.

* PlayedForLaughs in ''Film/CasinoRoyale1967''.

* [[Literature/TheDresdenFiles Harry Dresden]] found himself being put on e-Bay after being captured my a mid level baddie.

* The 2000 edition of ''Pay Day'' (which is in the Game Boy Advance version that also comes with Yahtzee and the TabletopGame/GameOfLife) has "Deal" cards that are "Auction Deals": instead of the Auction Deal only for the player who drew it, ''all the players'' can bid on it, highest bidder winning it. The catch is, only the player who drew it (or only the human players in the Game Boy Advance version as they must use the GB Advance or UsefulNotes/NintendoDS that the game is played on) knows the true value of the Deal. Getting other players (especially the AI players) to bid where they either lose money on the Deal or don't make enough in proportion to the bid and how much time is left to redeem the Deal (which can only be done on a "Found A Buyer" space or a mail card that lets you move to the next "Found a Buyer" space) for can be game-changing (any Deal, especially an Auction Deal, drawn late in the game might get no buyers if a player doesn't think he can get a roll that would let him land on "Found a Buyer" in time; games can be as long as six 31-day months to as few as just '''one''') as a Deal still held at the end of the game is worth '''NOTHING.'''

* ''VideoGame/BarnFinders'': Auctions are held down at the storage garage. You can go there to collect stuff to fix up at sell at your pawn shop.