Airport time slots are currently awarded by historic use, with only small number reserved for new entrants. This hampers competition, promotes inefficient slot utilisation, and contributes to congestion. This column revisits the idea of carefully auctioning time slots at congested airports in...

Course assignment is a very widespread problem in education and beyond. Typically, students have preferences for bundles of course seats or course schedules over the week, but courses have limited capacity. This is an interesting and frequent application of distributed scheduling, where payments...

Europe's clean energy transition is imperative to combat climate change and represents an economic opportunity to become independent of fossil fuels. As such, the energy transition has become one of the most important, but also one of the most challenging economic and societal projects today....

Germany was the first country in Europe that auctioned off spectrum in the valuable 700 MHz band for mobile telecommunication usage. The German regulator decided to auction off this spectrum together with spectrum in the 900 MHz and 1800 MHz legacy bands. With only the three incumbent operators...

Today's data centres offer many different IT services mostly hosted on dedicated physical servers. Virtualization provides a technical means for server consolidation leading to increased server utilization. The term refers to the abstraction of computing resources across many aspects of...

The Combinatorial Clock Auction is a two-stage auction format, which has been used to sell spectrum licenses worldwide in the recent years. It draws on a number of elegant ideas inspired by economic theory. A revealed preference activity rule should provide incentives to bid straightforward,...

Core-selecting combinatorial auctions are being used in an increasing number of spectrum sales worldwide. It was shown that equilibrium strategies can lead to outcomes that are further from the core than the Vickrey outcome in sealed-bid auctions. Ascending core-selecting auctions can even lead...