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The Office National des Forêts (ONF) in France uses sequential auctions to sell a significant portion of timber from public forests. This mechanism, based on a competitive dynamic between buyers, relies on randomization at two key moments: at the start of the sale, to determine the order in which timber lots are auctioned, and at the end, to break ties between bidders who submit identical offers. This article explains why, from the sociological perspective of markets, this informal institution, which was introduced at the request of municipalities and some buyers to ensure equal treatment, is not legitimized by the ONF. It examines whether participants’ perceptions are consistent with patterns of auction prices through an empirical analysis of bid data from these sales. The article also investigates the reasons why the ONF has been randomly selecting winners in cases of tied bids for over two centuries and, more recently, with the digitalization of sales, has opted for a new market device based on the order in which offers were submitted.

If bidders are better informed than the seller about a common component of auction heterogeneity, the seller can allocate more efficiently by keeping her reserve price secret and revising it using submitted bids. We build a model of a first‐price auction under unobserved auction heterogeneity—imperfectly observed by the seller—that captures this rationale and derive conditions for identification. An application to French timber auctions, where such revisions are widely used, shows that having perfect information about unobserved auction heterogeneity would increase surplus by 5.22%. Combining a secret reserve price with learning from submitted bids reduces this surplus gap by up to 84%.