Revenue Maximizing Mechanisms with Strategic Customers: Name-Your-Own-Price”, working paper

A designer allocates several indivisible objects to a stream of randomly arriv-ing agents. The long-lived agents are privately informed about their value for an object, and about their arrival time to the market. The designer learns about future arrivals from past arrivals, while agents strategically choose when to make themselves available for trade. We characterize revenue maximizing direct mecha-nism and show that it can be implemented by a ”Name-Your-Own-Price ” dynamic auction mechanism. ∗A previous version of this paper has been circulated under the title ”Demand Uncertainty and Dynamic Allocation with Strategic Agents”. We also wish to thank Ron Lavi, Konrad Mierendorff