A wide variety of auction models exhibit close relationships between the winner's expected profit and the expected difference between the highest and second-highest order statistics of bidders' information, and between expected revenue and the second-highest order statistic of bidders' expected...

Jeremy I. Bulow and Paul D. Klemperer (AER, 1996) argue that the usual concerns of auction design miss the big picture, and show that a simple English auction without a reserve price and N + 1 bidders attains expected revenue in excess of any auction with N bidders. The issue of how this...