Economic theory is often abused in practical policy-making. There is frequently excessive focus on sophisticated theory at the expense of elementary theory; too much economic knowledge can sometimes be a dangerous thing. Too little attention is paid to the wider economic context, and to the...

This paper reviews the part played by economists in organizing the British third-generation mobile-phone licence auction that concluded on 27 April 2000. It raised £22½ billion ($34 billion or 2½ % of GNP) and was widely described at the time as the biggest auction ever. We discuss the merits...

There were enormous differences in the revenues from the European ‘third generation’ (3G, or ‘MTS’) mobile-phone license auctions, from 20 Euros per capita in Switzerland to 650 Euros per capita in the UK, though the values of the licences sold were similar. Poor auction designs in some...

This paper provides an elementary, non-technical, survey of auction theory, by introducing and describing some of the critical papers in the subject. The most important of these are reproduced in a companion book, The Economic Theory of Auctions, Paul Klemperer (ed.), Edward Elgar (pub.),...

This is a preliminary draft of an Invited Symposium paper for the World Congress of the Econometric Society to be held in Seattle in August 2000. We discuss the strong connections between auction theory and 'standard' economic theory, and argue that auction-theoretic tools and intuitions can...

The most important issues in auction design are the traditional concerns of competition policy-preventing collusive, predatory, and entry deterring behaviour. Ascending and uniform-price auctions are particularly vulnerable to these problems (we discuss radiospectrum and football TV-rights...

We study the design of promotions in an organization where agents belong to groups that advance their cause. Examples and applications include political groups, ethnicities, agents motivated by the work in the public sector and corruption. In an overlapping generations model, juniors compete for...