vendor bid

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

• noun finance A type of bid at an auction which is made by the auctioneer on behalf of the vendor. This is used as a tactic to keep the bids moving, or to persuade buyers to pay more, or merely to have a higher price to report if the property is passed in (it's not that the vendor wants to buy what he or she is in fact selling). Such a bid is in essence a fiction, but so long as it's clearly announced genuine bidders can know what's going on. When that's not so it approaches the deliberate deception of a dummy bid.