Auction Market

is some form of centralized facility (or clearing house) by which buyers and sellers, through their commissioned agents (brokers), execute trades in an open and competitive bidding process. The "centralized facility" is not necessarily a place where buyers and sellers physically meet. Rather, it is any institution that provides buyers and sellers with a centralized access to the bidding process. All of the needed information about offers to buy (bid prices) and offers to sell (asked prices) is centralized in one location which is readily accessible to all would-be buyers and sellers, e.g., through a computer network. No private exchanges between individual buyers and sellers are made outside of the centralized facility.