The effectiveness of English auctions.
The performance of English auctions is studied under different assumptions concerning the seller's degree of ``Bayesian sophistication''. The effectiveness of an auction is defined as the ratio between the expected revenue it generates for the seller and the expected valuation of the object to the bidder with the highest valuation. Tight lower bounds on the effectiveness of the English auction are identified for general private-values environments and for private-values environments where the bidders' valuations are non-negatively correlated.
scientific article; zbMATH DE number 1956991
scientific article