I'm not sure that highest bidder is a good idea. Makes it very hard for smaller companies, e.g. startups, to compete with Google et. al.. Don't really know a good alternative tho. Prevailing wages are pretty easy to game to a significant degree by tuning the job title.
Huh? That may be true for some generic website/application startups. But if you're going for something requiring a lot of domain specific knowledge, I can't agree. There's more than a few fields with few enough experts that one can remember them all.
