A Vickrey auction or sealed-bid second-price auction (SBSPA) is a type of sealed-bid auction. Bidders submit written bids without knowing the bid of the other people in the auction. The highest bidder wins but the price paid is the second-highest bid. This type of auction is strategically similar to an English auction and gives bidders an incentive to bid their true value. The auction was first described academically by Columbia University professor William Vickrey in 1961[1] though it had been used by stamp collectors since 1893.[2] In 1797 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe sold a manuscript using a sealed-bid, second-price auction.[3]
Vickrey's original paper mainly considered auctions where only a single, indivisible good is being sold. The terms Vickrey auction and second-price sealed-bid auction are, in this case only, equivalent and used interchangeably. In the case of multiple identical goods, the bidders submit inverse demand curves and pay the opportunity cost.[4]
Vickrey auctions are much studied in economic literature but uncommon in practice. Generalized variants of the Vickrey auction for multiunit auctions exist, such as the generalized second-price auction used in Google's and Yahoo!'s online advertisement programmes[5] [6] (not incentive compatible) and the Vickrey–Clarke–Groves auction (incentive compatible).
In a Vickrey auction with private values each bidder maximizes their expected utility by bidding (revealing) their valuation of the item for sale. These type of auctions are sometimes used for specified pool trading in the agency mortgage-backed securities (MBS) market.
A Vickrey auction is decision efficient (the winner is the bidder with the highest valuation) under the most general circumstances; it thus provides a baseline model against which the efficiency properties of other types of auctions can be posited. It is only ex-post efficient (sum of transfers equal to zero) if the seller is included as "player zero," whose transfer equals the negative of the sum of the other players' transfers (i.e. the bids).
The dominant strategy in a Vickrey auction with a single, indivisible item is for each bidder to bid their true value of the item.[7]
Let
vi
bi
i's
i
\begin{cases} vi-maxj ≠ bj&ifbi>maxj ≠ bj,\\ 0&otherwise. \end{cases}
The strategy of overbidding is dominated by bidding truthfully (i.e. bidding
vi
i
bi>vi
If
maxj ≠ bj<vi
If
maxj ≠ bj>bi
If
vi<maxj ≠ bj<bi
The strategy of underbidding is dominated by bidding truthfully. Assume that bidder
i
bi<vi
If
maxj ≠ bj>vi
If
maxj ≠ bj<bi
If
bi<maxj ≠ bj<vi
Truthful bidding dominates the other possible strategies (underbidding and overbidding) so it is an optimal strategy.
The two most common auctions are the sealed first price (or high-bid) auction and the open ascending price (or English) auction. In the former each buyer submits a sealed bid. The high bidder is awarded the item and pays his or her bid. In the latter, the auctioneer announces successively higher asking prices and continues until no one is willing to accept a higher price. Suppose that a buyer's valuation is
v
b
v<b
v>b
Consider then the expected payment in the sealed second-price auction. Vickrey considered the case of two buyers and assumed that each buyer's value was an independent draw from a uniform distribution with support
[0,1]
v
x<v
v
[0,v]
e(v)=\tfrac{1}{2}v.
We now argue that in the sealed first price auction the equilibrium bid of a buyer with valuation
v
B(v)=e(v)=\tfrac{1}{2}v.
That is, the payment of the winner in the sealed first-price auction is equal to the expected revenue in the sealed second-price auction.
B(v)=v/2
B(v)
v
Note first that if buyer 2 uses the strategy
B(v)=v/2
B(1)=1/2
b
[0,1/2]
x
B(x)=x/2<b
x<2b
w(b)=2b
U(b)=w(b)(v-b)=2b(v-b)=\tfrac{1}{2}[v2-(v-2b)2]
Note that
U(b)
b=v/2=B(v)
In network routing, VCG mechanisms are a family of payment schemes based on the added value concept. The basic idea of a VCG mechanism in network routing is to pay the owner of each link or node (depending on the network model) that is part of the solution, its declared cost plus its added value. In many routing problems, this mechanism is not only strategyproof, but also the minimum among all strategyproof mechanisms.
In the case of network flows, unicast or multicast, a minimum-cost flow (MCF) in graph G is calculated based on the declared costs dk of each of the links and payment is calculated as follows:
Each link (or node)
ek
pk=dk+\operatorname{MCF}(G-ek)-\operatorname{MCF}(G),
where MCF(G) indicates the cost of the minimum-cost flow in graph G and G − ek indicates graph G without the link ek. Links not in the MCF are paid nothing. This routing problem is one of the cases for which VCG is strategyproof and minimum.
In 2004, it was shown that the expected VCG overpayment of an Erdős–Rényi random graph with n nodes and edge probability p,
\scriptstyleG\inG(n,p)
| p | |
| 2-p |
as n, approaches
\scriptstyleinfty
np=\omega(\sqrt{nlogn})
| \Omega\left( | 1 |
| np |
\right)
and
O(1)
with high probability given
np=\omega(logn).
The most obvious generalization to multiple or divisible goods is to have all winning bidders pay the amount of the highest non-winning bid. This is known as a uniform price auction. The uniform-price auction does not, however, result in bidders bidding their true valuations as they do in a second-price auction unless each bidder has demand for only a single unit. A generalization of the Vickrey auction that maintains the incentive to bid truthfully is known as the Vickrey–Clarke–Groves (VCG) mechanism. The idea in VCG is that items are assigned to maximize the sum of utilities; then each bidder pays the "opportunity cost" that their presence introduces to all the other players. This opportunity cost for a bidder is defined as the total bids of all the other bidders that would have won if the first bidder had not bid, minus the total bids of all the other actual winning bidders.
A different kind of generalization is to set a reservation price—a minimum price below which the item is not sold at all. In some cases, setting a reservation price can substantially increase the revenue of the auctioneer. This is an example of Bayesian-optimal mechanism design.
In mechanism design, the revelation principle can be viewed as a generalization of the Vickrey auction.