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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 ℚ or ℝ). Bids form a profile b : I → U.
winner b : I— the bidder with the highest bid, defined asAuction.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 asAuction.maxBidExcluding b (winner b).utility v b i : U— quasi-linear payoff for bidderiat valuation profilevand bid profileb: $$ u_i(v, b) \;=\; \begin{cases} v_i - \mathrm{secondPrice}(b) & i = \mathrm{winner}(b),\\ 0 & \text{otherwise}.\end{cases} $$
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 ofutilityas computational lemmas.utility_nonneg: truthful bidding ($b_i = v_i$) yields nonnegative payoff for bidderi, regardless of opponents' bids.
Mechanism and strategic-game packaging
mechanism : MechanismWithTransfers I (fun _ => U) I Upackages the second-price auction as a transfer mechanism ([[mechanism_design.transfer.mechanisms_with_transfers]]): the report type isUper bidder, the allocation type isI(the winning bidder), and payments live inUwithpaymentRule b w = if w = winner b then secondPrice b else 0.game v : StrategicGame I Upackages the same mechanism as a strategic game with bid profilebas the strategy profile and the quasi-linear payoff above as the utility function.game_eq_toStrategicGamecertifies thatgame vagrees withmechanism.toStrategicGamefor 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.