Like other commenters, you have posited a theoretical framework for how a bankruptcy court theoretically should work. None of this is how bankruptcy court actually works.

> you have posited a theoretical framework for how a bankruptcy court theoretically should work. None of this is how bankruptcy court actually works

Literally started by saying I'm holding judgement until reading the opinion.

My point is simply that if the reason the judge raised for re-starting the process is solely around the bids being sealed, they're wrong in a provable way.

Oh, it's not that at all. The problem with auction procedures in this case wasn't the actual auction methodology, but the lack of notice and the difficulty of submitting a bid. In any case, a judge does make the decisions in a bankruptcy court when the parties disagree about things. In this case, the creditors are not in agreement that this was okay.

A sealed-bid auction is a bit non-standard in a bankruptcy, but there should be no problem if all the bids get revealed post-facto. I wouldn't be surprised if this was mentioned in the opinion because it doesn't help you say that the auction was fair in light of everything else (if you're going to do non-standard stiff, do it in a very clean-looking way).

> roblem with auction procedures in this case wasn't the actual auction methodology, but the lack of notice and the difficulty of submitting a bid

Which would make sense. That's not what the article quotes as the judge's reason (nor what you've said).

The quote in the article criticises sealed bids. That's mind-blowingly wrong to the point of having substance on appeal. It's so wrong I expressed scepticism it's actually the case, scepticism based on experience evaluating bankruptcy claims.

Yeah, the article is incorrect about that (like I said, sealed bids are very unusual in bankruptcy auctions, but the actual opinion cites the other stuff), and when I said that the auction procedure was farcical, I did not mean that the underlying algorithm of the auction was wrong, but that the procedures run by the auctioneer were awful.

> They’re not as efficient as Vickrey auctions [3], but nobody actually does that.

I've always been curious -- do you know why?

It's certainly not for lack of familiarity, considering that paying the second-highest bid is basically how eBay works.

And eBay doesn't reveal people's maximum bids either. And so between that and the prevalence of last-second sniping, it essentially operates as sealed for all practical purposes.

The "winning" offer was formulated such that its cash value depended upon the next best offer. I.e., when you strip away the complexity it was of the form "next best offer + $". That this bid "won" indicates the "auction" was not a sealed-bid auction of the kind you are thinking of.

Wait no none of this is right, it doesn't make it an unsealed auction just because one or more of the bids has terms and conditions. This is how every real-estate transaction is conducted.

What makes it fine in the end is that once you collect all the bids and resolve the legal paperwork you can assign values to the individual bids and compare them which is how people who sell their homes choose what offer to go with. And home sellers do consider intangibles and go with lower-cash offers all the time.

I don't really understand what all the legal kerfuffle is about. Is the court really going to force the families into a sale they don't want when the sale is for their benefit however they choose to define it?