Separation between second price auctions with personalized reserves and the revenue optimal auction

When buyer valuations are drawn IID from a known regular distribution, a second price auction with a symmetric reserve price is the revenue-optimal single-item auction. When this distribution is irregular, we provide the first separation result showing that a second price auction with reserves earns at most 0.778 times the revenue of Myerson’s optimal auction, even when the reserves can be asymmetric. Since the lower bound is 0.745 for i.i.d. buyers, our result is nearly tight.