How do selling mechanisms affect profits, surplus, capacity and prices with unknown demand?
研究了在需求未知时，卖方销售同质商品的五种机制（标价、歧视性拍卖、统一价格拍卖、公开竞价及揭示机制），发现揭示机制利润最高，标价机制利润最低但总剩余最大，且拍卖中产能和保留价更低。
Abstract I analyze a model in which a seller wishes to sell multiple homogeneous goods to a large group of buyers with unknown demand. The seller may either sell objects via a posted‐price mechanism, a discriminatory‐price auction, a uniform‐price auction, their open‐bid analogs, or a revelation mechanism in which the seller first asks all potential buyers to report their valuations and then sets a reserve price. I show that the revelation mechanism leads to the greatest profits, the auction mechanisms result in identical expected profits and the posted‐price mechanism results in the smallest profits. However, the more profitable mechanisms impose stronger informational requirements that may make these mechanisms infeasible in practice, and the posted‐price mechanism also results in the greatest total surplus. I also find the seller chooses a lower capacity and reserve price in an auction than in the posted‐price mechanism.