Population uncertainty and revealing contestants

Abstract

A number of contestants randomly arrives according to a Poisson distribution. Under population uncertainty, a contest designer considers whether or not to reveal the number of players to bidders. We show that for the expected revenue, the two policies are equivalent, but for the expected winner's payment, the revealing policy dominates if the expected number of bidders is sufficiently large, whereas the concealing policy dominates if it is low. (C) 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.