Journal article
Reserve Price Signaling With Public Information: Evidence From Online Auto Auctions
The Rand journal of economics
02/26/2026
DOI: 10.1111/1756-2171.70047
Abstract
This article considers an auction model in which a seller's choice of reserve price signals her private information about the object's quality. We show that the signaling incentive would lower the seller's payoff and the probability of sale. We estimate the model using a novel dataset from a large online auto auction platform. Counterfactual simulations suggest that a secret reserve price could shut down the signaling incentive and improve both the seller's payoff and the probability of sale, which supports the prevalent use of secret reserve prices in practice.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Reserve Price Signaling With Public Information: Evidence From Online Auto Auctions
- Creators
- Junyan Guan - Northwestern UniversityBoli Xu - University of Iowa
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Publication Details
- The Rand journal of economics
- DOI
- 10.1111/1756-2171.70047
- ISSN
- 0741-6261
- eISSN
- 1756-2171
- Publisher
- Wiley
- Number of pages
- 22
- Language
- English
- Electronic publication date
- 02/26/2026
- Academic Unit
- Economics
- Record Identifier
- 9985141867002771
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