In a "Dutch auction" for new stock, individual investors place bids for shares directly. Each potential bidder indicates the price he or she is willing to pay and how many shares he or she will purchase at that price. The highest price that permits the company to sell all the shares it wants to sell is determined, and this is the "market clearing price." All bidders who specified this price or higher are allowed to purchase their shares at the market clearing price.
a. Trueb. False

A Dutch auction is a method for pricing shares (often in an initial public offering) whereby the price of the shares offered is lowered until there are enough bids to sell all shares. All the shares are then sold at that price. The goal of a Dutch auction is the find the optimal price at which to sell a security.

For example, let's assume Company XYZ wants to sell 10 million shares using a Dutch auction. To participate in a Dutch auction, an investor typically opens an account with Company XYZ's underwriter (usually an investment bank), obtains a prospectus, and obtains an access code or bidder identification code (Dutch auctions often occur online).

During bidding, investors indicate how many shares they're willing to buy and the price they're willing to pay. The underwriter, who acts as the auctioneer, usually starts the auction by offering a prohibitively high price for the security (say, $40 per share in this case). It then lowers the price gradually to say, $36 per share, where two bids come in for 500,000 shares. The underwriter then lowers the price again, this time to $35, and attracts 4,000,000 shares worth of bids. After lowering the price to $34, the underwriter gets another 5,000,000 shares worth of bids; then the underwriter lowers the price to $33 and gets another 3,000,000 in bids before the auction ends.