The 2010 German 4G spectrum auction was an unusually large simultaneous ascending multi-band auction. The bidding was competitive and the final assignment was efficient. However, our analysis suggests that independent and rational bidders had an opportunity to coordinate implicitly on a lowrevenue outcome. Coordination was difficult, though, because of a multiplicity of focal points. One import...

A simultaneous pooled auction with multiple bids and preference lists is a way to auction multiple objects, in which bidders simultaneously express a bid for each object and a preference ordering over which object they would like to get in case they have the highest bid on more than one object. This type of auction has been used in the Netherlands and in Ireland to auction available spectrum. W...

The rapid growth of wireless technology has led to increasing demand for spectrum. In the past, spectrum is statically allocated. As a result, many wireless applications cannot use idle spectrum even though it is left unused by the owner for a long period of time. The low utilization of already scarce spectrum resource requires us to dynamically reallocate the idle spectrum to achieve better sp...

We study auction mechanisms for allocating power among a group of spread spectrum users. The users are assumed to share the bandwidth with a licensed user, or spectrum owner, which imposes a received power constraint (corresponding to a constraint on interference) at a particular measurement location. Both co-located and non-collocated receivers are considered. Each user receives a utility that...

With the increasing demands for radio spectrum, techniques are being explored that would allow dynamic access of spectrum bands that are underutilized. In this regard, a new paradigm called dynamic spectrum access is being investigated where wireless service providers (WSPs) would dynamically seek more spectrum from the under-utilized licensed bands when and where they need without interfering ...

We review the uses of economic theory in the initial design and later improvement of the “simultaneous ascending auction,” which was developed initially for the sale of radio spectrum licenses in the US, with efficiency of the final allocation as the statutory goal. We analyze some capabilities and inherent limitations of the auction, the roles of various detailed rules, the possibilities for i...

The combinatorial clock auction has become popular for large-scale spectrum awards and other uses, replacing more traditional ascending or clock auctions. We describe some surprising properties of the auction, including a wide range of ex post equilibria with demand expansion, demand reduction, and predation. Our results obtain in a standard homogeneous good setting where bidders have well-beha...

0— +1— In August 1993 President Bill Clinton signed a historic law granting the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) the authority to auction spectrum licenses.1 The origin of this law dates back to Ronald Coase’s 1959 proposal to sell the radio spectrum. Congress gave the FCC until August 1994 to begin the fi rst auction. To someone inexperienced in the activities of large bureaucracie...

Combinatorial auctions have been studied analytically for several years, but only limited experimental results are available, in particular for auctions with more than 10 items. We investigate the Hierarchical Package Bidding auction (HPB), the Combinatorial Clock auction (CC), and one pseudo-dual price auction (PDP) experimentally, as all these formats were used or suggested for high-stakes sp...

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 efficie...