Spectrum Auctions

This paper presents an overview of the upcoming television broadcast spectrum incentive auction in the U.S., which will be the first ever attempted worldwide, and discusses the main business, regulatory and technical challenges of a successful incentive auction. The process combines two separate but linked auctions: a reverse auction, which will identify the prices at which broadcasters are willing to relinquish their spectrum; and a forward auction, which will determine the price mobile network operators are willing to pay to acquire the new frequencies. The two auctions will determine the buyers and sellers and also the amount of spectrum to be cleared in the 600 MHz band after reorganizing the television stations that remain on air. This process is known as repacking and will create contiguous blocks of cleared spectrum at the high frequency side of the UHF band for mobile use. The paper also reviews the potential plans for the 600 MHz band and discusses the opportunities that could bring about the new digital terrestrial television standard known as " ATSC 3.0 " .

Advocates for a ‘different and innovative approach’ to conceptualizing
markets have argued that it is possible to reengineer markets to deliver any
number of salutary public policy goals. These ‘consulting engineers for the market
economy’ have supported their ambitions by referring to the participation of
game theorists in the design and implementation of spectrum auctions. However,
the variegated and inconsistent lessons drawn from their participation indicate
that the role game theorists actually played in the auctions is not well understood.
The confusion appears to stem from significant omissions in the available (mostly
first-hand) accounts, which are boastful in taking credit for the performance of
the auctions but strangely demure in recounting the precise measures undertaken
to bring it about. In this paper, I provide an unexpurgated account of the
circumstances surrounding the participation of game theorists in the most
celebrated of spectrum auctions, those held under the auspices of the US Federal
Communications Commission (FCC). Using the FCC’s archival records, I recover
the suppressed role of the commercial funding of economic research in
determining both the extent and the nature of the economists’ participation. This
analysis emphasizes the crucial importance of the method of funding in
determining how economic research is brought to bear on public policy.

Abstract The author presents the case for a better to approach to spectrum use involving a pragmatic and searching fashion rather than with an ideological mind set that equates the free market with one and only one particular allocation technique. Spectrum auctions are ...

The core message of the report of the advisory committee on the distribution of FM -spectrum for commercial radio is to redistribute the FM-licenses in 2022. The report has been requested by Mrs. Mona Keijzer, the Secretary of State for Economic Affairs and Climate, responsible for telecommunications policy among other things. Members of the committee were, Henk Don (former board member of the Netherlands Authority for Consumers and Markets, chair), Annemarie Drahmann (Leiden University) and Paul Rutten (research professor at  Creating 010 of Rotterdam University of Applies Sciences). As of September 1, 2022, the current licenses for commercial FM radio and the associated channels on DAB+ (digital radio) will end. The committee advises distributing new licenses by means of an auction and thereby taking measures that solve current bottlenecks for the sector and stimulate a smooth transition to digital radio.

The current licenses date from 2003 and were extended in 2011 and 2017. The national licenses are currently in use by commercial radio stations such as Radio 538, Sky Radio, Slam! Radio10, 100%NL and BNR Nieuwsradio. There are also private stations in the market that broadcast regionally, such as RadioNL and Radio Decibel. The advice for a new distribution is based on two main arguments. Firstly, scarce frequency licenses are in principle redistributed after their term, so that new entrants have a chance to enter the market and the incumbent license holders are not disproportionately favored. Secondly, the existing rules and conditions of the frequency licenses need to be updated, since there has been important changes in the radio market as well as in distribution technology . In their current state the licenses lead to a number of important problems that cannot be properly solved without a new distribution procedure.

Henk Don, chairman of the Advisory Board: “After two extensions and a total license period of nineteen years, it is not possible to wait again with a new allocation, which offers parties new opportunities and promotes the efficient use of the frequency spectrum. And the sector itself identifies a number of bottlenecks that cannot be properly resolved without a new distribution.”

The Advisory Board prefers an auction to a comparative test. An auction provides more social welfare than any other distribution method. Public interests can be sufficiently safeguarded by pre-establishing a number of rules and conditions. The Commission recommends that the new permits have a term of 10 to 12 years (from 1 September 2022).

The advice attaches great importance to the transition from FM to DAB+. Regulations are also needed for the DAB+ spectrum, in order to guarantee the plurality and diversity of the commercial radio offer and to promote competition so that the frequency space is used efficiently. The Advisory Board believes that the transition has not yet progressed enough to determine when the FM band can be switched off.

The Commission proposes to clause at least two licenses and associated frequency spectrum. This includes news and Dutch music. Whether further clauses will be introduced is a matter that the Commission leaves to politicians.

In order to carry out its assignment, the Advisory Board consulted various experts, gathered views by means of a market consultation and interviewed various representatives from the sector. The advisory report explains in detail how the Commission has assessed the various issues and weighed up the often divergent interests.

The second-generation (GSM) spectrum auction in Germany is probably the most clear cut example of a low price outcome in a simultaneous ascending-bid multi-unit auction. The present paper gives an account of the events, describes the auction rules and market conditions, and provides a game theoretic explanation of low price equilibrium in simultaneous, ascending-bid multi-unit auctions. In particular, it is

Abstract------------------------------The literature has demonstrated that second-price common-value auctions are sensitive to the presence of asymmetries among bidders. Bikhchandani (1988) has shown that if it is common knowledge that a bidder has a disadvantage compared to her opponent, this bidder (almost surely) never wins the auction. This paper is the first to show that this result does not carry through when one allows for two-sided uncertainty. Whe show that even if the probabilities that one of the bidders is advantaged while the other one is disadvantaged are arbitrarily large, in every equilibrium, the disadvantaged bidder needs to win the auction with strictly positive probability. We then solve for the equilibria in two cases (one with two types and another with a continuum of types) and we characterize their expected revenues properties. We find that although they underperform relative to "comparable " symmetric auctions, they perform much better than what it...