A Vickrey auction is a type of sealed-bid auction, where bidders submit written bids without knowing the bid of the other people in the auction, and in which the highest bidder wins, but the price paid is the second-highest bid. The auction was first described academically by Columbia University professor William Vickrey in 1961 though it had been used by stamp collectors since 1893. This type of auction is strategically similar to an English auction, and gives bidders an incentive to bid their true value.
Vickrey's original paper mainly considered auctions where only a single, indivisible good is being sold. In this case only, the terms Vickrey auction and second-price sealed-bid auction are equivalent, and are used interchangeably. However, when either a divisible good or multiple identical goods are sold in a single auction, these terms are used differently.
Vickrey auctions are much studied in economic literature, but are not particularly common in practice. One market in which they have been used is stamp collecting. eBay's system of proxy bidding is similar, but not identical, to a Vickrey auction. A slight generalized variant of a Vickrey auction, named generalized second-price auction, which is different from the VCG mechanism, is known to be used in Google's and Yahoo!'s online advertisement programmes. NYU Law School uses an iterated version of the Vickrey auction model for its course registration lottery.
Read more about Vickrey Auction: Proof of Dominance of Truthful Bidding, Use in Network Routing, Generalizations
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