Affiliated Common Value Auctions with Costly Entry
研究了投标成本高昂时，不同拍卖规则如何影响潜在投标人的参与决策，发现不披露实际投标人数常能提高卖方预期收益。
Abstract Many auctions and procurement contests entail non-trivial bidding costs, which makes the bidders’ participation decisions endogenous to the auction design. We analyse the effect of different auction rules on potential bidders’ incentives to participate. We focus on first-price auctions with affiliated common values and a large pool of potential bidders. Our main interest is on auctions where the realized number of bidders is unknown at the bidding stage. In contrast to the standard case, both participation and bidding decisions are often non-monotonic in the symmetric equilibrium of our model. The expected revenue to the seller is often higher in the auction where the realized number of participating bidders is not disclosed.