
Ask HN: Are there any auctioning algorithms? - gradinaru_alex
I&#x27;ve been researching into algorithms used by major commercial websites (such as Amazon or eBay) to set prices. As I see there is a lot of auctioning on eBay, I can&#x27;t help but wonder if some or a majority of these auction are done through algorithms, such as transactions done on the stock market. Is there any material that I can read regarding this and auction theory in general ? It doesn&#x27;t seem to give a lot of results on google.
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justinv
I'd say look at Google - they (sort of) use a form of second-price auction [0]
(also known as a Vickrey auction (first described by William Vickrey, a Nobel
Laureate economist)) for their bidding process for AdWords. In short - a
second-price auction is an auction where the highest bidder pays the second
highest bid price.

A lot of auction theory (and price theory) is grounded in economics, so
there's a fair amount of information out there in academic economic papers
(Such as one on Vickrey - [1]). I'm not sure if they'd address what you are
looking for from an algorithm perspective, but most economics papers will
discuss (in depth) the quantitative aspect of the research, data, and results.

[0] [https://www.quora.com/Game-Theory/Why-in-a-Vickrey-
auction-d...](https://www.quora.com/Game-Theory/Why-in-a-Vickrey-auction-does-
one-pay-the-second-highest-price-and-not-his-price) [1]
[http://econ.ucsb.edu/~tedb/Courses/UCSBpf/readings/Lovelybut...](http://econ.ucsb.edu/~tedb/Courses/UCSBpf/readings/LovelybutLonely.pdf)

edit: I'd also recommend a cursory look at various auction pages on wikipedia
to get an idea of what you'd be interested in finding out about.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vickrey_auction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vickrey_auction)

