Interesting that you bring that up because the D3 RMAH was... kind of my idea :D
It was around that time that I was pitching so many ideas to my friend that worked at Blizzard and a lot of my ideas were implemented (So many Starcraft 2 ideas).

I begged and pleaded for them to make all items in D3 BIND ON EQUIP and my friend was like nah we don't like that. It created item hyperinflation. Once a good item enters the economy it will literally never leave because it will just be resold over and over and over again.

There was also clear and blatant corruption in the background. The search functionality in the AH was trash so devs that could tap into the backend and search it with custom algorithms made an absolute killing until the entire thing blew up.