Following the successful PCS Auction conducted by the US Federal Communications Commission in 1994, auctions have replaced traditional ways of allocating valuable radio spectrum, a key resource for any mobile telecommunications operator. Spectrum auctions have raised billions of dollars...

The winner-take-all nature of all-pay auctions makes the outcome sensitive to decision errors, which we introduce with a logit formulation. The equilibrium bid distribution is a fixed point: the belief distributions that determine expected payoffs equal the choice distributions determined by...