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auction bidders’ symmetric and dominant strategies. We find that groupbuying is likely to be more effective in settings where there is larger lowvaluation demand than highvaluation demand. Thus, the structure of demand at different level of willingnesstopay by consumers matters. This has relevance to the marketplace for new cameras, nextgeneration microprocessors and puters, and other highvaluation goods. We obtained additional results for the case of continuous demand valuations, and found that there is a basis for the seller to improve revenues based on the effective design of the groupbuying auction price curve design. THEORY The model for the groupbuying auction mechanism with uncertain bidder arrival that we will develop spans three streams of literature: demand uncertainty, consumer behavior and related mechanism design issues。 auction economics and mechanism design theory。 and current theoretical knowledge about the operation of groupbuying auctions from the IS and electronic merce literature. Demand Uncertainty, Consumer Behavior and Mechanism Design Demand uncertainties typically are posed of consumer demand environment uncertainty (or uncertainty about the aggregate level of consumer demand) and randomness of demand in the marketplace (reflected in brief temporal changes and demand shocks that are not expected to persist). Consumer uncertainty about demand in the marketplace can occur based on the valuation of products, and whether consumers are willing to pay higher or lower prices. It may also occur on the basis of demand levels, especially the number of the consumers in the market. Finally, there are temporal considerations, which involve whether a consumer wishes to buy now, or whether they may be sampling quality and pricing with the intention of buying later. We distinguish between different demand level environments. In addition, it is possible that these consumer demand environments may coexist, as is often the case when firms make strategies for price discrimination. This prompts a seller to consider setting more than one price level, as we often see in realworld retailing, as well as groupbuying auctions. Dana (2020) pointed out that when a monopoly seller faces uncertainty about the consumer demand environment, it usually will not be in his best interest to set uniform prices for all consumers. The author studied a scenario in which there were more buyers associated with high demand and fewer buyers associated with low demand. In the author’s proposed price mechanism, the seller sets a price curve instead of a single price, so as to be able to offer different prices depending on the different demand conditions that appear to obtain in the marketplace. It may be useful in such settings to employ an automated pricesearching mechanism, which is demonstrated to be more robust to the uncertain demand than a uniform price mechanism will, relative to expected profits. Unlike Dana’s (2020) work though, we will study settings in which there are fewer buyers who exhibit demand at higher prices and more buyers who exhibit demand at lower prices. This is a useful way to characterize groupbuying, since most participating consumers truly are pricesensitive, and this is what makes groupbuying auction interesting to them. Nocke and Peitz (2020) have studied rationing as a tool that a monopolist to optimize its sales policy in the presence of uncertain deman