Abstract

To sell a good before a deadline, a monopolist chooses between posting a price and running a costly reserve-price auction each period. Buyers with independent private values arrive over time. For a wide range of auction costs, the profit-maximizing mechanism sequence is to post prices first and then to run auctions. The optimality of the prices-then-auctions mechanism sequence provides a new justification for the hybrid sales mechanism of allowing the “Buy It Now” option before a standard auction on eBay.

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