We use theory and experiment to explore the effectiveness of price-guided mechanisms to assign resources in package allocation problems. Two mechanisms are tested: the combinatorial clock auction (CCA) of Porter, Rassenti, Roopnarine, and Smith (2003) and a matched version of the simultaneous ascending auction (SAA), similar to designs currently in use for spectrum and electricity sales. Unlike...

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has used auctions to award spectrum since 1994. During this time period, the FCC has experimented with a variety of auctions rules including click box bidding and anonymous bidding. These rule changes make the actions of bidders less visible during the auction and also limit the set of bids that can be submitted during a particular round. Economic the...

We are responding to Public Notice DA 05-1267, which seeks comment on the proposed experimental design to eva luate aspects of the FCC's alternative auction methods, both with and without package bidding. The experimental design is ambitious. Our main comment is that the effort will be more productive if there is more focus on elements for which past experience and existing knowledge does not p...

Auctions are an area of great academic and commercial interest, from tiny auctions for toys on eBay to multi-billion-dollar auctions held by governments for resources or contracts. Although there has been significant research on auction theory, especially from the perspective of auction mechanisms, studies of autonomous bidding agents and their interactions are relatively few and recent. This p...

Secure auctions have many potential uses including eVoting, computational resource allocation and FCC spectrum auctions.The SGVA privacy preserving auction scheme is able to conduct combinatorial auctions and keep the losing bid values secret. However, SVGA is a black box so users have no means to assure themselves that the auction has actually taken place and that their bid has been included i...

We use theory and experiment to explore the effectiveness of price-guided mechanisms to assign resources in package allocation problems. Two mechanisms are tested: the combinatorial clock auction (CCA) of Porter, Rassenti, Roopnarine, and Smith (2003) and a matched version of the simultaneous ascending auction (SAA), similar to designs currently in use for spectrum and electricity sales. Unlike...

This paper investigates the perfect Bayesian equilibrium in an ascending-price core-selecting auction, which was recently used in the U.K. spectrum auction. We suppose that there are two goods, two local, and one global bidders. The local bidders demand only one of the goods, whereas the global bidder wants both. Although local bidders generally face the threshold problem and have incentives to...