Secret reserve prices by uninformed sellers
信息不足卖家的秘密保留价
If bidders are better informed than the seller about a common component of auction heterogeneity, the seller can allocate more efficiently by keeping her reserve price secret and revising it using submitted bids. We build a model of a first‐price auction under unobserved auction heterogeneity—imperfectly observed by the seller—that captures this rationale and derive conditions for identification. An application to French timber auctions, where such revisions are widely used,…