 The reason is that the buyer will buy whenever the buyer’s valuation v is at least as large as the price p. Since the probability that v is larger than p is given by 100-p percent, the seller’s expected profit is p·(100-p)/100, which is maximized by p=50.Myerson (1981) proves that the optimal reserve price remains to be 50 in this example, regardless of the number of potential buyers.Bulow and Klemperer (1996) have shown that an auction with n bidders and an optimally chosen reserve price generates a smaller expected profit for the seller than a standard auction with n+1 bidders (and no reserve price).