#auctiondesign

Sfoglia il catalogo della prossima #asta di #design  https://www.santagostinoaste.it/design ← #auctiondesign #santagostinoaste

"Because authors couldn’t trust the sales numbers if and when their publishers provided them, 19th-century book contracts were for a fixed fee rather than per-copy royalty payments. [..] there’s no mystery to Goethe’s choice of mechanism. The author wanted to know how much he was worth to Vieweg (perhaps with an eye to extracting higher royalties from his publishers over the longer run), and he devised this peculiar “auction” to get Vieweg to tell him. [..] Goethe had stumbled into what is now known as a “Vickrey auction,” only formally described in 1961 by economist William Vickrey. The Vickrey auction (or “second price sealed bid auction”) has the peculiar characteristic that you don’t need to think about how much to bid or strategize on what others might do — there’s really no strategy at all. Instead, in a Vickrey, the best approach is to simply bid exactly how much you value an item. In fact, this particular auction type drives everything from the sale of Google ad words to bids on eBay. [..] What Goethe wanted was information, a reduction in the asymmetry between him and his publisher. And that is exactly what his Vickrey auction revealed. Goethe surely realized that his best work was still ahead of him [..] Anticipating the new economics of the mid-20th century, he realized that where markets are concerned, information is power. [..] Based on Vieweg’s now-public sales records, Hermann and Dorothea went on to be a bestseller, earning tens of thousands of talers for Vieweg and nary a penny more for poor Goethe. You can have the best-designed mechanism, but it doesn’t do you the least bit of good if the game is rigged to begin with."