When bidders bid on complex objects, they might be unaware of characteristics effecting their valuations. We assume that each buyer's valuation is a sum of independent random variables, one for each characteristic. When a bidder is unaware of a characteristic, he omits the random variable from the sum. We study the seller's decision to raise bidders' awareness of characteristics before a second-price auction with entry fees. Optimal entry fees capture an additional unawareness rent due to unaware bidders misperceiving their probability of winning and the price to be paid upon winning. When raising a bidder's individual awareness of a characteristic with positive expected value, the seller faces a trade-off between positive effects on the expected first order statistic and unawareness rents of remaining unaware bidders on one hand and the loss of the unawareness rent from the newly aware bidder on the other. We present characterization results on raising public awareness together with no versus full information. We discuss the winner's curse due to unawareness of characteristics.

翻译：当竞拍者对复杂标的物出价时，他们可能未意识到某些影响其估值的特征。我们假设每位买方的估值是一组独立随机变量之和，每个变量对应一个特征。当竞拍者未意识到某一特征时，他会将该随机变量从求和式中忽略。我们研究卖方在收取入场费的次价拍卖前提升竞拍者对特征认知度的决策问题。最优入场费能够获取因竞拍者未意识到特征而产生的额外“无意识租金”——这是由于未意识到的竞拍者错误感知了自身获胜概率及获胜后需支付的价格。当提升竞拍者对具有正期望值的特征的个体认知时，卖方面临权衡：一方面，预期一阶统计量的正向影响与剩余未意识到竞拍者的无意识租金；另一方面，新获得意识的竞拍者所带来的无意识租金损失。我们给出了关于提升公共认知的刻画结果，并与无信息和完全信息情形进行对比。最后，我们讨论了因特征未意识到而产生的“赢者诅咒”现象。