Definition Second-Price (Vickrey) Mechanism
definition formalized

Second-Price (Vickrey) Mechanism

The second-price (Vickrey) auction is a sealed-bid single-item mechanism in which the bidder submitting the highest bid wins the item, and the winner pays the second-highest bid. All other bidders pay nothing.

Setup

Fix a finite, nontrivial bidder set I and an ordered abelian group U of bids and utilities (for example or ). Bids form a profile b : I → U.

  • winner b : I — the bidder with the highest bid, defined as Auction.argmaxBid b. Ties are broken by the deterministic argmax of the basic auction layer ([[mechanism_design.auction.basic.ordered_bid_utilities]]).
  • secondPrice b : U — the highest bid among all bidders other than the winner, defined as Auction.maxBidExcluding b (winner b).
  • utility v b i : U — quasi-linear payoff for bidder i at valuation profile v and bid profile b: $$ u_i(v, b) \;=\; \begin{cases} v_i - \mathrm{secondPrice}(b) & i = \mathrm{winner}(b),\\ 0 & \text{otherwise}.\end{cases} $$

Basic properties

  • secondPrice_le_bid_winner: the second-highest bid never exceeds the winning bid, $\mathrm{secondPrice}(b) \le b(\mathrm{winner}\,b)$.
  • utility_winner, utility_loser: the case analysis of utility as computational lemmas.
  • utility_nonneg: truthful bidding ($b_i = v_i$) yields nonnegative payoff for bidder i, regardless of opponents' bids.

Mechanism and strategic-game packaging

  • mechanism : MechanismWithTransfers I (fun _ => U) I U packages the second-price auction as a transfer mechanism ([[mechanism_design.transfer.mechanisms_with_transfers]]): the report type is U per bidder, the allocation type is I (the winning bidder), and payments live in U with paymentRule b w = if w = winner b then secondPrice b else 0.
  • game v : StrategicGame I U packages the same mechanism as a strategic game with bid profile b as the strategy profile and the quasi-linear payoff above as the utility function.
  • game_eq_toStrategicGame certifies that game v agrees with mechanism.toStrategicGame for the auction utility function.

Position in the library

The second-price auction is an instance of the general transfer-mechanism interface ([[mechanism_design.transfer.mechanisms_with_transfers]]). Its DSIC property is proved in the companion theorem node [[mechanism_design.auction.basic.second_price_dsic]]. The first-price auction with the same allocation rule but different payment is in [[mechanism_design.auction.basic.first_price_mechanism]].

References

  • [MFoGT, Chapter 1, Section 1.2.4 and Exercise 4] Maschler, Solan, and Zamir, Game Theory. Vickrey auction example.
  • [AGT, Chapter 9, Section 9.3.2] Nisan, Roughgarden, Tardos, and Vazirani, Algorithmic Game Theory. Vickrey auction as the canonical truthful single-item mechanism.
  • [Krishna, Chapter 2] Vijay Krishna, Auction Theory, 2nd ed.. Standard second-price sealed-bid auction formulation.
  • [Vickrey 1961] William Vickrey, "Counterspeculation, Auctions, and Competitive Sealed Tenders", Journal of Finance 16(1):8–37.

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