Started by Tomás Rinaldi (@tomas_rinaldi) ·
Goethe ran a second-price auction 160 years before it had a name
In a sealed-bid auction where the winner pays the second-highest bid, your best move is to bid exactly what it's worth to you. Goethe apparently used a version of this in 1797 to sell a manuscript to a publisher, with his minimum price sealed in an envelope.
6 sources · 34 min down the hole
How I got here
- Started with
- “why bid your true value second price auction”
- Ended at
- Auction theory
The Trail
- “why bid your true value second price auction” (google.com)
- Vickrey auction (en.wikipedia.org)
- William Vickrey (en.wikipedia.org)
won the Nobel in 1996 and died three days after it was announced
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (en.wikipedia.org)
- Proxy bid (en.wikipedia.org)
eBay's auto-bidding is roughly the same idea
- Auction theory (en.wikipedia.org)
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