I think it happens a fair amount. Google may have actually wanted the patents at he right price, but may have wanted its competing bidders to overpay if it couldn't win the bid. The aricle said there were about 6,000 patents. I suppose some of them might be ground breaking tech but most are probably worthless or science projects at best. At $4.5 billion, this winning bid sounds like a winner's cure to me. I think Google has some good game theoriests who artificially drove up the price for it's competitors. But who knows, maybe they really wanted to pay up to $4 billion and were genuinely disappointed when they didn't win.