Google changed ad auctions, raising prices 15%, witness says
The auction code was worse than a Google-only black box, when I was in Ads. The code itself was in a "high intellectual property" subdirectory that most engineers could not access.There's an elaborate economic rationale for second-price auctions, including that they avoid "winner's remorse." Leave it to the late-stage "improvers" to say, "hey, we can capture some of that gap between first and second place!"