We attempt a more realistic abstraction of an English (oral ascending) auction than the standard, in Milgrom and Weber [1982]. In particular, the assumptions that exists are irrevocable and necessarily public are dropped. In the model, the price rises in a stylization of an auctioneer...

We analyze the preferences of a risk-averse seller over the class of "standard" auctions with symmetric and risk-neutral bidders. Assuming that buyers' private signals are independently distributed, we find that a sealed-bid first-price auction with an appropriately set reserve price is...

Even though auctions are capturing an increasing share of commerce, they are typically treated in the theoretical economics literature as isolated. That is, an auction is typically treated as a single seller facing multiple buyers or as a single buyer facing multiple sellers. In this paper, we...