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.
apparently happens a lot during spectrum auctions which is why they refined the auction system
Essentially people try and convey information to the other bidders through the amounts of their bid. Like putting an area code at the end of a large bid to indicate that is the market you want.