We study auctions where bidders have private information about their entry costs and the seller does not benefit from these entry costs. We consider a symmetric environment where all bidders have the same value for the object being sold, and also an asymmetric environment where bidders may have...

We study private-value auctions with a large number of bidders. We calculate approximations of the equilibrium bids and the seller's revenue in first-price auctions regardless of whether the bidders are symmetric or asymmetric, or risk-neutral or risk-averse. Furthermore, we show that...

Although naive intuition may indicate the opposite, the existing literature suggests that uncertainty about costs in the homogeneous-good Bertrand model intensifies competition: it lowers price and raises total surplus (but also makes profits go up). Those results, however, are derived under two...