Doesn't that defeat the purpose of the auction in the first place? That would simply become "the ticket goes to whoever writes the largest number on this piece

Doesn't that defeat the purpose of the auction in the first place? That would simply become "the ticket goes to whoever writes the largest number on this piece of paper", right? I believe to reach your intended goal (i.e. the seller doesn't want to profit from the auction), you would have to redistribute the price increase among all participants. A way to do this would be as follows (needless to say, completely unpractical fantasy land experiment, I'm only doing this for the sake of argument): - Have people freely register. Let's say you have M tickets, N people registered, the interesting case is when N >> M. - Assign to each registered participant M/N of a ticket (assume tickets are infinitely divisible), and collect from them M/N * P where P is the intended price of a single ticket. - Have people trade fractions of tickets. The seller collects exactly M * P, and under usual assumptions the price of a ticket would converge to its 'true' value.