[skimdesk]

Facebook's ad platform famously uses the Vickrey–Clarke–Groves auction [0]. In theory it rewards advertisers for bidding for ads using their true valuation, or rather, the lifetime value of a customer.

In practice, it's a lot more convoluted, but the basic principle is fascinating.

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vickrey%E2%80%93Clarke%E2%80...

[soared]

All of programmatic was vickrey up until a few years ago when everyone switched to traditional first price auctions. I miss those days - it was easy to bid outrageous prices ($100 cpms) but still pay a reasonable amount. Now you need deep/machine learning to evaluate each bid value, and then another algo to predict how much you can shave off that bid and still win the auction.