Whammy Bid

An Auction is happening, people are bidding in sensible increments and then, all of a sudden, someone puts in such a high bid that no one would dare bid against them. This can be an escalation of a bidding war or a total newcomer. The correct name for this kind of tactic is a Jump Bid and it can be very effective, or it can land you paying far more than you needed to. Used primarily for dramatic effect, either to highlight the value of the item (particularly if it was previously considered of low value or it has a secret use) or to dramatically introduce a character to a scene. Nothing says "I am rich and powerful, look this way" like doubling the bid for a teapot when the last bidder had just got to £900,000. Also very common in in Bachelor Auction setups. A similar setup can occur in gambling, where a gambler tries to scare off the other gamblers with a huge wager.

Depending on the format of the auction this may or may not be possible in Real Life.

Anime & Manga

 * In the Sabaody Archipelago arc of One Piece, a friend of the crew is captured and auctioned as a slave with a starting bid of 70 million Berries. The crew is confident that they can buy her back because they have 200 million Berries, but before they even get to speak, a Celestial Dragon buys her for 500 million, crushing their hopes.
 * Of course,
 * A variation occurs in Slayers Next when Lina and her Rival Martina one-up bid with each other for a particular set of Magic Items of great power, but the owner Xellos doesn't actually want to sell. As the bidding hits "299! 300! 301!" Xellos finally gets angry enough to say that the items are worth 300 million.  Lina instantly accepts his "offer" -- the unwitting auctioneer gets hit by his own whammy!  (Although, being Xellos, it's possible it was his plan all along.)
 * Alex does this in Last Exile during the auction of a very important Plot Coupon. As it happens, the Big Bad is also bidding on the same item. The result is a series of escalating Whammy Bids that takes the price from 1 Million to 50 billion.
 * A pretty straight-forward example in Gallery Fake. Fujita doubles the price on a Monet from $10 Million to $20 Million, despite the fact that he had a budget of $10 million.

Fanworks

 * In The Harem War by Radaslab, a Harry Potter fic, there is a secret sex-slave economy in the shadows of the Wizarding World. Upon learning that many of the girls from his year in school are to be sold into slavery by an unscrupulous wizard who has managed to get valid guardianship over them, a newly-empowered and -enriched Harry decides to rescue them -- and with luck permanently damage the slave economy -- by buying them all for ten times or more the going rate at the auction where concubines are sold.

Film
"Auctioneer: We'll begin at $20 million...Thank you, sir. 20.5...
 * In Groundhog Day, the winning bid for is one of these.
 * Hudson Hawk. At the auction of the da Vinci Sforza:

Darwin Mayflower: Waldo! 100 million clams!

Auctioneer: $100 million to Mr. Darwin Mayflower."


 * Oklahoma! (1955): Will Parker (somewhat inadvertently) bids $50 for his girlfriend Ado Annie's picnic basket (which was a lot of money at the time the story was set). The previous bid was 90 cents. He's then immediately outbid (It Makes Sense in Context) and doesn't pursue the picnic basket any further.
 * Happens in the 1947 Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. film Sinbad the Sailor, with the twist that Sinbad has already discouraged any bidding by depicting the ship being bid on as "cursed".
 * In North By Northwest, the main character so violently insists upon his whammy bids that he gets arrested for disorderly conduct. Which gives him a police escort out of the place, safely away from the men in the crowd who wanted to kill him.
 * Played for Laughs in that the whammy bids were ridiculously low for the objects being sold.
 * "Seven million! Never leave the cave without it."
 * In Paint Your Wagon, a drunken Ben Rumson (Lee Marvin) sees a beautiful woman (in what had been a males-only gold mining camp) and promptly stumbles into the auction selling her. As soon as he figures out what's going on, he bellows, "Whatever the last bid was -- double it!" and passes out. This leaves the auctioneer to quickly convert the complicated previous bid (in cash, powder gold, tools, supplies, and livestock) down into a single amount and hit up Ben's Pardner (Clint Eastwood) for the payment.
 * In Once Upon a Time In The West, a widow's farm had been put in auction. The bids were in the hundreds when a five-thousand-dollar bid was made. Instead of paying with money, the bidder brought in a wanted man for which a reward in the bid's value had been offered.
 * In Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, Holmes makes one of these, in order to get the attention of everyone in the auction house so he can warn them of the fire that's just started behind him.

Literature

 * In The Halfblood Chronicles, Shana is being auctioned off by the elves. She's about to be sold for 200 gold pieces when a new bidder in Lord Dyran's livery bids 300. Twisted a bit, in that the real reason no one counter-bids is that no one is suicidal enough to cross Lord Dyran.
 * Inverted in Soul Kitchen. After the underdog hero's limit of €200,000 has been easily matched by the evil property developer, a break in his concentration allows the hero to win with a ridiculously low increment of €15.
 * Into the Void by Nigel Findley (The Cloakmaster Cycle) there was an item among others at a Nimbral auction that turned out to be mostly useless, but historically valuable artifact of Precursors. Then the Arcane entered and reminds everyone that the near-monopoly on spelljamming stuff made his kind obscenely rich. He counters current 600 (which is already too much for thing most humanoids cannot even use as a normal sword) with seven thousand gold pieces. What, someone's ready to buy it for 7,500? T'k'Pek just answers with 10,000.
 * Ostap Bender attempts to purchase the eponymous Twelve Chairs with one, for no other reason than his love for dramatic effects. It bites him in the ass when it turns out his partner squandered half their money and they don't have enough to pay the commission fee.

Live Action TV

 * Happened on an episode of Star Trek Deep Space Nine, where Q bid a million bars of gold-pressed latinum (about twice as high as anyone else).
 * This happened on Arrested Development when Buster came in late and put in an obscenely high bid on a date with his mother Lucille. Unfortunately he didn't realize that his mother wasn't up for bid at the time, it was next door neighbor Lucille II. She thought it was a romantic gesture to show how much he cared for her.
 * And in a later bachelorette auction, GOB also pulls a whammy bid... and also uses it on Lucille 2 instead of his mother.
 * In Power Rangers Lost Galaxy, when the villains are auctioning off the Pink Ranger's quassar saber, Astronema  announces her presence this way. Then she immediately ups her bid to "all of you get to live".
 * The Reality Tv show Storage Wars has this as a tactic employed by the star bidders.
 * Allen and Ton on Auction Hunters also use this method at times.
 * In Angel when Cordelia's eyes are being bid on due to their prophetic powers, to stall she goads two bidders get into a war with each other, until eventually one kills the other. Then a Wolfram and Hart lawyer who'd been on the phone with her bosses presumably gets permission to bid, and wins the auction immediately.

Video Games

 * You can do this in The Legend of Zelda the Wind Waker. And it's the most effective tactic to keep opponents from bidding at all.
 * In Final Fantasy VI, there are certain items in the Jidoor auction house that you just can't win, no matter how cool they seem. You know you're looking at these items when a kid in the audience keeps piping up, demanding his dad get the item for him. No matter how much you bid, you'll eventually be beaten out when the kid's dad puts in a last-minute Whammy Bid, to the shock of everyone at the auction. Fortunately, these items are never useful in any conventional RPG sense, so completionists need not worry about the loss.
 * In short, it only generally happens with items you are not MEANT to have.
 * Much like the Wind Waker example above, Devil Survivor games can have this happen during the Auction of Evil if enough money is bid. This is particularly visible in Devil Survivor 2 in Special Auctions, where it is almost a necessity to ensure you actually acquire that rare demon.

Western Animation

 * Family Guy has this happen in the episode where Peter is brainwashed into being cultured.
 * During an auction for anchovies in Futurama, Fry tries to one-up Mom with a bid of "one jillion dollars!", to the surprise of everyone. Except the auctioneer. "Sir, that's not a number." Fry gives a replacement bid of one billion dollars, which still wins the auction.
 * In Batman the Animated Series, an artifact of power once belonging to Morgan Le Fay is mixed in with an antiquities auction. Jason Blood, the human host of the demon Etrigan, and Klarion the Witch-Boy (dum, dum, dum) have a brief bidding war ending in the low six figures when Blood is forced to concede defeat. Bruce Wayne, who knows Blood, wins it for him with a sudden "One... million."
 * Subverted in "Harlequinade": A really big bomb is up for auction. The gangsters bid increasingly absurd amounts for it. And then they hear The Joker's voice: "How about nothing? That's right...I'm talking zero, zip, zilch, nada."
 * Superfriends: Several villains wanted to make a bid for a piece of Gold Kryptonite, which had the power to permanently render Superman powerless. Darkseid then caught all of them by surprise by offering $1. Despite easily having the money to make a better offer, no other villain would defy him.
 * Hurricanes: When Stavros Garkos tried to acquire a McGuffin at an auction, he instructed his proxy to start with one of those.
 * The Simpsons: Homer left Bart and Lisa to keep his spot at a DMV line. In retaliation, when it'd be his turn to be served, Bart and Lisa auctioned it. After several people made bids, Fat Tony offered a lollipop for it. Being a mafia boss, his offer was quickly accepted.

Real Life

 * A few of these were made in Yoshiki Hayashi's auction of a piano for the March 11, 2011 Japanese quake and tsunami relief effort. They took the price well into the millions of US dollars (billions of yen) before the auction was taken down. The bidders were all Trolls, and the piano actually sold, when the auction resumed, for under $150,000..
 * Some of these were placed when Pope Benedict's old car went up for sale on eBay, again running the price over a million dollars before the bids were cleared. When the auction was relaunched, though the previous high bids were not reached, the hatchback still sold for over $240,000.
 * Google made such whammy bids for some patents some time back. The whammy part is not because of the huge bidding amount, but because the numbers are mathematical constants, including pi.