But that's a counterfactual. Once the pop occurs, the company could not have gone with a higher price and pocketed more cash. A rational actor should make the best decision they can make given the information they have at the time, place their bets, and take their chances. The article clearly made it seem like having a pop (as differentiated from having a higher stock price) was a favor that Twitter was doing investors, and that somehow this favor would be repaid by market at large via some mechanism that's totally mysterious to me. I'm honestly really baffled that this meme gets repeated so much, and I'm open to explanations.

Dutch auctions do sound good in theory, and I'm aware of what happened with Google's: a 17% pop, which left some money on the table, but much less than Twitter did. Google's stock did abnormally well in the months following, but it's hard for me to divine how much of this had to do with the IPO mechanism. In any case, I think a sample size of one is probably not enough to draw much of a conclusion one way or the other.