Comment by tz18

Parent commenter's description of the difference between an ascending bid auction and a second price auction (or Vickrey auction) is very confused. You can review the first chapter of "Mechanism Design and Approximation" for an introduction to auctions and proofs of the optimality of different auctions for different goals (e.g. the second price auction is proven to maximize social surplus): https://jasonhartline.com/MDnA/