We compare the expected revenue in first- and second-price auctions with asymmetric bidders. We consider “close to uniform” distributions with identical supports and show that in the case of identical supports the expected revenue in second-price auctions may exceed that in first-price...

We compare the seller's expected revenue in asymmetric second-price auctions with the benchmark case where all bidders have the average distribution. We show that with two bidders, asymmetry has a negative effect on revenue. However, for n 2 bidders there is no clear observation we can make. We...