Auctions with Dynamic Populations: Efficiency and Revenue Maximization

Abstract

A seller has an uncertain number of perishable goods to sell in each period. Privately informed buyers arrive stochastically to the market. Buyers are risk neutral, patient, and have persistent private values for consuming a single unit. We show that the seller can implement the efficient allocation using a sequence of ascending auctions. The buyers use memoryless strategies to reveal all private information in every period, inducing symmetric behavior across different cohorts. We extend our results to revenue maximization, showing that a sequence of ascending auctions with asynchronous price clocks is an optimal mechanism.