Optimal Mechanisms for an Auction Website

This paper considers a multi-period auction with a seller who has a single object for sale, a large population of potential buyers, and an auction Web site of the trade. The seller and every buyer have independent private values of the object. The Web site designs an auction mechanism which maximizes her revenue subject to certain constraints for the traders. In each period the seller auctions the object to a set of buyers drawn at random from the population. The seller can re-auction the object (infinitely many times) if it is not sold in previous interactions. We characterize the class of Web site-optimal auction mechanisms.