Multiunit auction
Open-knowledge reference entry
A multiunit auction is an auction in which several homogeneous items are sold. The units can be sold each at the same price (a uniform price auction) or at different prices (a discriminatory price auction).
Uniform price auction
A uniform price auction otherwise known as a "clearing price auction", pay-as-clear or marginal price auction, "marginal price system" (MPS), is a multiunit auction in which a fixed number of identical units of a homogenous commodity are sold for the same price. Each bidder in the auction may submit (possibly multiple) bids, designating both the number of units desired and the price he/she is willing to pay per unit.
Typically these bids are sealed, not revealed to the other buyers until the auction closes. The auctioneer then serves the highest bidder first, giving them the number of units requested, then the second-highest bidder and so forth until the supply of the commodity is exhausted. All bidders then pay a per unit price equal to the lowest winning bid (the lowest bid out of the buyers who actually received one or more units of the commodity) - regardless of their actual bid. Some variations of this auction have the winners paying the highest losing bid rather than the lowest winning bid.
A uniform price auction may be utilised to aggregate a number of units offered by more than one seller to multiple buyers. This style of auction, sometimes referred to as a call market or double auction, shares the characteristics of an open market mechanism in which all buyers and all sellers interested in trading a homogenous commodity may participate simultaneously.
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This entry incorporates text from “Multiunit auction” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.