Earlier quoted context omitted.
> main reasoning by the judge seemed to be that a single round sealed bid process is unlikely to maximize the sale price which on it's surface seems pretty accurate Did the judge argue against the single round or the sealed price? Criticising sealed bids is nonsense. The gold-standard auction (Vickrey, or more accurately, VCG) features sealed bids. If the judge is criticising sealed bids at all , The Onion should app…
I have real world experience with a lot of different auction designs being deployed, including many variations of the VCG auction. The VCG auction is only good in theory. In practice, most people don't know how much they actually value a thing, and when they are trying to play the VCG game they typically underbid and later have deep remorse. That's the most common mistake, but I've seen plenty of other mistakes as we…
May I hazard a guess that you worked on low-value recurring auctions? You're describing unsophisticated bidders unwilling to expend search costs. For them, yes, "the seller has an interest in providing participants with as much information as possible about the object’s value" both before bidding starts and during it, the latter due to the impact to bids being less than the overcoming of search costs.
> the auction that seems to work the best is the Ebay auction, where you get immediate feedback if you underbid, but you aren't allowed to see how high the other person is willing to go
Another comment highlights why this doesn't work for high-value items [2]. (They also assume bona fide bids, which isn't a problem if you can filter out shill bids.)
[1] https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2020/pop...