A Theory of Indicative Bidding
研究了企业拍卖中指示性投标（非约束性初步报价）的信息传递作用，发现当进入拍卖有成本时，投标者会通过有限数量的报价形成均衡，帮助卖方筛选高价值投标者，但并非总能选中最高价值者。
When selling a business by auction, sellers typically use indicative bids—nonbinding preliminary bids—to select a small number of bidders to conduct due diligence and submit binding offers. We show that if entry into the auction is costly, indicative bids can be informative: symmetric equilibrium exists in weakly increasing strategies, with bidders “pooling” over a finite number of bids. The equilibrium helps the seller select high value bidders with higher likelihood, although the highest value bidders are not always selected. When the number of potential bidders is large, revenue and total surplus are both higher than when entry is unrestricted.