This paper analyzes six spectrum auctions conducted by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) from July 1994 to May 1996. These auctions were simultaneous multiple-round auctions in which collections of licenses were auctioned simultaneously. This auction form proved remarkably successful....

The FCC was an innovator in adopting the rules of the simultaneous ascending-price auction for its sales of spectrum licenses. While these rules have performed well in the auctions conducted so far (and would perform even better with the design improvements suggested in our first report), there...

Several partners jointly own an asset that may be traded among them. Each partner has a valuation for the asset; the valuations are known privately and drawn independently from a common probability distribution. We characterize the set of all incentive-compatible and interim- individually-...

An effective package bidding mechanism addresses three problems: the exposure problem (the risks a bidder faces in trying to construct an efficiently large combination of licenses), the free-rider problem (the difficulties small bidders have in beating those who bid for larger packages of...

We evaluate a number of possible enhancements to the FCC auctions. We consider only changes to the current auction rules that stay within the basic format of the simultaneous multiple round auction for individual licenses. This report summarizes and extends our e-mail exchanges with FCC staff on...

A proposed auction design for incentive auctions is given. The two-sided auctions enable the exchange of spectrum from a low-value use, such as over-the-air TV broadcast, to a high-value use, such as mobile broadband. The approach is both simple and effective. The auction has three stages...

The best sites for offshore wind farms on the US Outer Continental Shelf are scarce. To make the best use of this scarce resource, it is necessary to implement a fair and efficient mechanism to assign wind rights to companies that are most likely to develop off-shore wind energy projects....

The present invention primarily concerns hybrid auctions that may, for example, combine a clock auction with a proxy auction. Hybrid auctions include multi-item auctions that comprise at least two phases of package auctions: an earlier phase in which bidders participate in a clock auction (or...

In the original proposal for the combinatorial clock auction (Ausubel, Cramton and Milgrom, 2006), a revealed-preference approach was taken to limiting bidders’ activity, based on their earlier activity. However, empirical implementations of the CCA to spectrum auctions have tended to place...

We examine bidding behavior in a clock auction in which price is set by the lowest-accepted bid and provisional winners are reported each round (the LABpw auction). This format was used in the India 3G spectrum auction. In the standard theory, the auction performs poorly. In particular it yields...