I'd say look at Google - they (sort of) use a form of second-price auction [0] (also known as a Vickrey auction (first described by William Vickrey, a Nobel Lau

I'd say look at Google - they (sort of) use a form of second-price auction [0] (also known as a Vickrey auction (first described by William Vickrey, a Nobel Laureate economist)) for their bidding process for AdWords. In short - a second-price auction is an auction where the highest bidder pays the second highest bid price. A lot of auction theory (and price theory) is grounded in economics, so there's a fair amount of information out there in academic economic papers (Such as one on Vickrey - [1]). I'm not sure if they'd address what you are looking for from an algorithm perspective, but most economics papers will discuss (in depth) the quantitative aspect of the research, data, and results. [0] https://www.quora.com/Game-Theory/Why-in-a-Vickrey-auction-does-one-pay-the-second-highest-price-and-not-his-price https://www.quora.com/Game-Theory/Why-in-a-Vickrey-auction-d... [1] http://econ.ucsb.edu/~tedb/Courses/UCSBpf/readings/LovelybutLonely.pdf http://econ.ucsb.edu/~tedb/Courses/UCSBpf/readings/Lovelybut... edit: I'd also recommend a cursory look at various auction pages on wikipedia to get an idea of what you'd be interested in finding out about. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vickrey_auction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vickrey_auction