There's a concept in economics called the winner's curse[1], which says that, in an auction with uninformed bidders, some fraction tend to significantly overbid, and whoever wins tends to have significantly overpaid. Having briefly lived in San Francisco, in particular, and worked in the early-stage startup scene, I'm inclined to believe that working for most early-stage startups is a winner's curse. Too many of your peers overpay with their time and energy for too high of a price (too low of a rate). The only way to get in is to overpay.
If only we could vickrey auction the situation. 2 developers bid their time per week on a role, and the winner contributes however much time the 2nd place bidder had bid + 1 minute.
Unfortunately (fortunately?) - people aren't fungible like that.
Also, note that 2nd-price auctions don't help if many bidders overbid. You'd have to take some sort of consensus price. It's possible, but I'm not aware of any well-known examples.
Interestingly, the winner's curse doesn't talk about market rate. It supposes that the thing in question has some sort of objective, anchored value, which, importantly, the bidders don't know or are misinformed about ahead of time.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winner%27s_curse