No, it really isn’t. Not with two bidders. The moment the first party announces their bid you have perfect collusion (if the second party, rationally, runs out the clock) or a stalled auction (if running out the clock is impossible, thereby always allowing someone to always claim they’ll bid better).
Wrong. Vickrey auctions are well studied in single-item auctions even with two bidders [1]. (They perform between 4/3 and 2 compared to an optimal omniscient auction. Not solved. But not unstudied.)
> claimants to receive 100% of the equity of the business
This is Chapter 7. The bankruptcy estate already legally owns the asset, not Jones.
[1] https://www.timroughgarden.org/papers/bk.pdf Examples 4.6 and 5.2
Call it 52,000 from the onion sale.
well now someone says I could have bought it for 10 million.
trustee now gets $300,000. They’re not going to get in the way.
Sealed-bid auctions are incredibly common across markets [1]. Real estate. Corporate mergers.
Note, too, that an English auction is revenue equivalent to a second-price sealed-bid auction [2], and here we had a first-price sealed-bid auction with two bidders.
There may be valid reasons to challenge this auction. Sealed bids is absolutely, definitively not one.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-price_sealed-bid_aucti...
[2] https://www.sfu.ca/~idudnyk/Auctions_Part2_Revenue_Equivalen...