Riding the US wave: spectrum auctions in the digital age

Given its significant technological advantages compared to analog broadcasting, digital television (DTV) will be the television system of the future. However, it requires a full replacement of analog television sets by digital receivers, as DTV can only be watched with special equipment. In order to make this transition happen smoothly without losing the analog television audience, both signals have to be simulcasted until a substantial coverage with DTV broadcasting has been achieved. Australia and the US meanwhile have established a regulatory framework to lead this transition towards the end of analog broadcasting, the so-called analog switch-off. Part of the US regime is the FCC's obligation to reassign analog frequencies after the switch-off has taken place by means of auction. Spectrum auctions, however, originate not from the US but from New Zealand, where they have been used since the end of 1989 and ever since been subject to legal and political criticism. The article outlines the principles of both the DTV and spectrum auctions regulation and shows the links between both areas of telecommunications regulation. It concludes by suggesting that the analog switch-off is a unique opportunity to reconsider current spectrum policies, as it frees large amounts of the radio spectrum that are today occupied by analog broadcasting and will soon be subject to one of the biggest frequency reassignment processes in the history of telecommunications regulation.     

Fixed versus variable supply in the public provision of goods

Using discriminatory price auctions with variable supply, we explore a situation in which a corruptible public employee is in charge of producing and allocating a finite number of goods among consumers with uniformly distributed valuations. The negative effects of corruption are lower when the employee‘s task is to “provide at least q₀ goods” than when the employee is required to “provide exactly q₀ goods”.     

Bidding asymmetries in multi-unit auctions: Implications of bid function equilibria in the British spot market for electricity

This paper introduces and tests Bid Function Equilibria (BFE) in the British spot market for electricity. BFE extend von der Fehr and Harbord's (1993) multi-unit auction model of wholesale electricity markets by allowing firms to have heterogeneous costs for different generating units. Pure-strategy equilibria in BFE predict asymmetric bidding by producers: a single firm (the “price-setter") bids strategically while other firms (“non-price-setters") bid their costs. We test for asymmetries in firms' bid functions in the British spot market between 1993 and 1995 and find strong empirical support for the theory. We conclude that BFE have important implications for the design and governance of electricity markets.     

Dominant Strategy Adoption and Bidders' Experience with Pricing Rules

Truthful revelation is a dominant strategy in both English (oral ascending bid) and second-price sealed-bid private-values auctions. Controlled observations of English auctions are largely consistent with the dominant strategy prediction, but laboratory second-price auctions exhibit substantial and persistent overbidding, even with prior experience. However, the experience of having bid in an English auction has a significant learning effect, moving bidding in subsequent second-price auctions closer to the dominant strategy. I explore two treatments isolating facets of the lessons learned from English auction participation, leading me to the following conclusions. Part of the lesson carried over appears to be considering prices one-by-one, but most of it appears to be a crude awareness that overbidding leads to losses. A claim that English auction experience teaches subjects to recognize the dominant strategy in second-price auctions seems overly optimistic. I introduce a nonparametric technique to test coefficient restrictions when the assumption of normally distributed errors is untenable.     

土地供应方式转变对房价的影响

中国城市土地供应方式经历了由无偿划拨到有偿出让,从协议出让到招拍挂出让的转变历程,当前招拍挂已经成为经营性用地的唯一出让方式。在地方政府"土地财政"的利益驱动下,土地单一垄断供应体制下的"招拍挂"土地出让方式已经成为影响房价上涨的重要因素之一。要遏制房价过快上涨的势头,应从根源上切断地方政府在房地产市场中的利益链条。     

Synergistic valuations and efficiency in spectrum auctions

In spectrum auctions, bidders typically have synergistic values for combinations of licenses. This has been the key argument for the use of combinatorial auctions in the recent years. Considering synergistic valuations turns the allocation problem into a computationally hard optimization problem that generally cannot be approximated to a constant factor in polynomial time. Ascending auction designs such as the Simultaneous Multiple Round Auction (SMRA) and the single-stage or two-stage Combinatorial Clock Auction (CCA) can be seen as simple heuristic algorithms to solve this problem. Such heuristics do not necessarily compute the optimal solution, even if bidders are truthful. We study the average efficiency loss that can be attributed to the simplicity of the auction algorithm with different levels of synergies. Our simulations are based on realistic instances of bidder valuations we inferred from bid data from the 2014 Canadian 700 MHz auction. The goal of the paper is not to reproduce the results of the Canadian auction but rather to perform “out-of-sample” counterfactuals comparing SMRA and CCA under different synergy conditions when bidders maximize payoff in each round. With “linear” synergies, a bidder's marginal value for a license grows linearly with the total number of licenses won, while with the “extreme national” synergies, this marginal value is independent of the number of licenses won unless the bidder wins all licenses in a national package. We find that with the extreme national synergy model, the CCA is indeed more efficient than SMRA. However, for the more realistic case of linear synergies, SMRA outperforms various versions of CCA that have been implemented in the field including the one used in the Canadian 700 MHz auction. Overall, the efficiency loss of all ascending auction algorithms is small even with high synergies, which is remarkable given the simplicity of the algorithms.     

Bidding ‘as if’ risk neutral in experimental first price auctions without information feedback

Experimental research on first price sealed bid auctions has usually involved repeated settings with information feedback on winning bids and payoffs after each auction round. Relative to the risk neutral Nash equilibrium, significantly higher bidding has been reported. The present paper reports the results of experimental first price auctions with n=7 where feedback on payoffs and winning bids is withheld. Under these conditions, average bidding is below the risk neutral Nash equilibrium prediction but converges to it with repetition.

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Electronic Supplementary Material  The online version of this article () contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.      

Optimal fees in internet auctions

An auction house runs a second-price auction with a possibility of resale through re-auctions. It collects listing and closing fees from the seller. We find the fees which maximize the revenue of the auction house. In particular, we show that the optimal listing fee is zero. Our findings are consistent with the policies of eBay, Amazon, Yahoo, and other Internet auctions.      

Truthful multi-unit multi-attribute double auctions for perishable supply chain trading

This paper aims to propose multi-attribute double auctions for perishable supply chain trading (PSCT). We first construct a multi-unit/single-unit multi-attribute double auction (MS-MDA) for PSCT where suppliers can submit bids on a single unit of one item (i.e., single output restriction). We then relax the single output restriction and propose a multi-unit multi-attribute double auction (M-MDA) for PSCT in which each supplier offers multiple units of one item. Both the MS-MDA and M-MDA mechanisms are incentive compatible, individually rational, budget balanced and computationally efficient. The computational study shows that all proposed mechanisms are of high allocation efficiency and practically implementable.