[AnthonyMouse]

If the bids are secret and the highest bidder pays what they bid then bidders have the incentive to try to bid strategically, i.e. less than what they'd be willing to pay as long as they think that's more than anyone else would be willing to pay. Plus, if there is someone who thinks it's worth way more than anyone else, they could just place a modest bid and then if they lose buy it from the winner for $1 more than what the winner values it at anyway.

The way you can avoid this with secret bids is to specify that the highest bidder will pay $1 more than the second highest bidder no matter how high they bid. Then everyone has the incentive to actually specify the maximum they'd be willing to pay, because if the next highest bid is lower than that they still actually do want to buy it, but they lose nothing by bidding higher because they only pay a dollar more than the next highest bidder no matter what, and then you maximize bids.

But by that point you don't benefit from keeping the high bid a secret anymore, because of human psychology. Someone bids $100, is the current high bidder and thinks they're getting to buy it, then someone outbids them and loss aversion kicks in so they make a higher bid, even though the first bid was supposed to be their max.

[llimllib]

Known as a "second-price" or Vickrey auction for anybody who wants to read some auction game theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vickrey_auction

[freejazz]

Yeah but in the bankruptcy setting, this would demonstrate that the trustee didn't get as much as they could.

[AnthonyMouse]

Does it? If it's public knowledge that Alice would pay $200 and Bob would pay $100 then Alice wouldn't actually bid $200, she'd bid $101 and still win, the same result as that type of auction. If nobody knows what Alice would bid except Alice then it's even worse, because Bob thinks he could win at $60 and would rather pay $60 than $100 and Alice correctly predicts that Bob is going to do that and then wins by bidding $75. And if Bob bids $80 then Alice can still buy it from Bob for $110 but the estate is still getting $80 instead of $101.

[rob_c]

Go bank to pseudo security. This is the letter of an argument again ingnoring the spirit of the judgment/law/...

[johnnyanmac]

The spirit is that a person owes families he defamed billions of dollars and that person doesn't like who they need to sell their assets to to make that money. I don't even know how and why the details of how this money is recouped is important. If I go bankrupt and need to sell my house, I sure can't stop it from being sold to Hitler or something absurd like that.

[freejazz]

Well they are the creditors, so they put their credit up against the value of the thing. It's no different than what a bank does when it bids on a house it put up for auction after a mortgagee default. Here the only difference is that the bidding was blind, which the judge took issue with.

[rob_c]

I'm not talking about that I'm talking about the technicalities of the ruling. Go away

Its a classic maximisation problem something the overblown ai skating community should understand nothing to do with feelings or secret agreements because of that. Should be allowed to buy back goes own stuff minus debt no, but go fix the system if you don't like that...

[wbl]

How would it do that? You need to leave a little on the table for the deal to work.

[freejazz]

Because they'd be paying a dollar more than the second highest bid, not the amount of the highest bid. Frankly, I'm not sure how that could not be more clear.

[wbl]

They wouldn't have made that bid if the rules were different! A vickrey auction has a lot of support as getting revenue.

[freejazz]

So?

[AnthonyMouse]

So a bid of $200 in a Vickrey auction that results in a $101 sale price doesn't imply that you could have otherwise gotten $200, because in a different type of auction the bidder wouldn't have bid that much.