We examine how buyers' behaviors, sellers' profits and the social welfare (the total surplus of all sellers and buyers) vary with the order of sellers in sequential auctions where sellers have different reservation values. First, when reserve prices are exogenously set to be sellers' reservation...

We study sequential auctions as optimal mechanisms in selling multiple heterogeneous items. We find that a sequence of arbitrary standard auctions, ordered in decreasing variation of buyers’ valuations, achieves full efficiency and constrained optimal revenue subject to (IC), (IR) and an...