Note that the term "Dutch auction" is overloaded, but in this case the article specifies: > Often called a "Dutch" auction, this type of sale allows any invest

Note that the term "Dutch auction" is overloaded, but in this case the article specifies: > Often called a "Dutch" auction, this type of sale allows any investor—institution or individual—to put in a bid over the Web for a certain number of shares at a certain price without knowing what others are offering to pay. After the bidding, the highest price at which every available share can be sold becomes the price for all the shares—the IPO price. Google, along with early backers, was selling almost 20 million shares, and bids could be submitted for as few as five. This doesn't actually remove the incentive to underbid. You might be thinking of a Vickrey auction? That's an auction of one item, in which the high bidder pays the second-highest bid. (This is what I always think of when I hear "dutch auction".) There's an obvious generalization to auctioning multiple items; but the Google auction is not that generalization, and also that generalization apparently doesn't work. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_auction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_auction and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vickrey_auction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vickrey_auction . Frustratingly, the Dutch auction page describes a "second-price auction" which is different from that described on the "second-price auction" page that it links to, which redirects to Vickrey auction. It's a whole mess.