Sellers Lose Big When Auction Bids Are Revealed, Hurting Consumers
The article explores how revealing winning bids in repeated auctions affects bidders' strategies and the seller's profit. By analyzing both theory and lab experiments, the researchers found that disclosing winning bids leads to lower profits for the seller due to bidders lowering their bids in anticipation of the revealed bid. This disclosure also causes bidders to bunch their bids at the top end for high-value items.