We study contests where several privately informed agents bid for a prize. All bidders bear a cost of bidding that is an increasing function of their bids, and, moreover, bids may be capped. We show that regardless of the number of bidders, if bidders have linear or concave cost functions, then...

The paper analyzes the seller's expected revenue in auctions with a large number of asymmetric players. We explicitly calculate the revenue in large asymmetric first-price, second-price, and optimal auctions to O(1/n^3) accuracy, where n is the number of players. These calculations show that the...