Bidding box for home-played games. Use of bidding boxes has several advantages over oral bidding: it reduces noise in the room, prevents bidding being overheard at neighboring tables, allows easier review of the auction, and reduces the opportunity to pass unauthorized information to one's partner (intentionally or not) by the manner and intonation in which one makes one's bid. A bidding box is typically a plastic box with two slots, each containing a set of bidding cards. One slot contains 35 cards with symbols of bids (5 denominations—clubs (), diamonds (), hearts (), spades (), and notrump (NT)—in seven levels of bidding,
All-pay auction All-pay auction In economics and game theory, an all-pay auction is an auction in which every bidder must pay regardless of whether they win the prize, which is awarded to the highest bidder as in a conventional auction. In an all-pay auction, the Nash equilibrium is such that each bidder plays a mixed strategy and their expected pay-off is zero. The seller's expected revenue is equal to the value of the prize. However, some economic experiments have shown that over-bidding is common. That is, the seller's revenue frequently exceeds that of the value of the prize, and in repeated games