Sounds of Seoul Marketplaces: auctioning at Garak Market

The video snippet about the Garak Market, taken from the DVD "Sounds of Seoul Marketplaces" has some interesting pieces of info concerning auctioneering, which is how the agricultural products are sold in that marketplace. Link to the Garak Market video (5:59) Here an auctioneer explains that most of what he talks in an auction is meaningless babble (sounding something like aariariariari) only to encourage the bidders, and only the accepted bid and the bidder are announced in clear language, since they don't always show up in the screens. Only from this video I learn that what I've taken to be just simply "auction" (huutokauppa, kyôngmae) is "English auction" to be exact, the auctioneering beginning from a certain price and the merchandise going to the highest bidder. "Japanese auction" is a kind of auction in which trading takes place in a very quick succession, and the auctioneer decides the moment in which the highest bid is accepted. There's also another explanation at a website: A type of sequential second price auction, similar to an English auction in which an auctioneer regularly raises the current price. Participants must signal at every price level their willingness to stay in the auction and pay the current price. Thus, unlike an English auction, each participant must bid at each level to stay in the auction. The auction concludes when only one bidder indicates his willingness to stay in. This auction format is also known as the button auction. And I also learn about "Dutch auction" in which the auctioneer sets a price from which he starts lowering it until someone bids it. Below is a captured image from the flower market (hwahwe花卉 sijang), where a man inspects the flowers before the auction. Categories at del.icio.us/hunjang: marketplaces ∙ anthropology ∙ Koreanstudies ∙ Seoul