[elil17]

The system proposed in this post has the advantage of correctly pricing every seat individually without anyone having to put in multiple bids. The people buying earlier are paying the highest price and get to choose the best seats. Those buying later would pay less but the good seats would already be taken.

A Vickery auction would not, I think, lend itself to that kind of price discovery.

[the_mungler]

Good point, but you could address that by splitting up the seats into multiple auctions depending on the quality of the seats.

People could even bid "conditionally" for multiple sections, and once bidding closes you resolve the separate auctions in order from best to worst. If a person with multiple bids gets a good seat, their bids in the other sections get cancelled.

Seems to me that this could have very similar results as the dutch auction method, but each ticket is more fairly priced. Your ticket costs the same as the next guy, assuming they have a seat in the same section as you.

Edit: also, as mentioned somewhere else here, you're likely to have a threshold where everyone wants to buy once they see available seats start to disappear, causing a kind of "bank runoff" where everyone rushes to buy tickets all at once, putting us back where we started.

[elil17]

People don't want to do complex bidding schemes. Even Vickery auctions confuse people - look at how eBay has to call their Vickery auction "automatic bidding" to alleviate that confusion.

A threshold effect could certainly exist, that would be one issue with that scheme.

[the_mungler]

Yeah, you're right about that. I'll admit this topic sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole on how this could be accomplished. An alternative scheme could be a Vickery Clarke Groves or generalized second price auction. These bidding schemes are used to price online adverts. Once the auction closes, let people choose their seats in order of who paid the most. This let's you place one bid, and individually prices each seat, but the downside is you don't know how good a seat your bid will get you. Still, would probably be easier to understand. If you bid more, you get first pick.