Assessing Economic Outcomes in Simulated Reverse Clock Auctions for Radio Spectrum

We investigate the economic outcomes that result under simulated bidder behavior in a model of the FCC’s reverse auction for radio spectrum. In our simulations, limiting our notion of efficiency to the reverse auction in isolation, the reverse clock auction achieves very efficient solutions, the FCC’s scoring rule greatly reduces the total payments to TV broadcasters at the cost of some efficiency, and using a poor feasibility checker can have grave consequences both in terms of the auction’s cost and efficiency.