That used to be the case, and so for space efficiency the long tail of 3rd and lower bids from every company was truncated before even going into the auction process.
That is about the only hint you need to know to understand what project Bernanke was (apart from the willingness to assume that it was fair, and the past bid data was used only to compute initial experiment constants in the adjusted bidding formulas).
There's "reverse tree" and then there's that...