Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making for an Unknowable Future
by Mervyn King and John Kay · 5 Mar 2020 · 807pp · 154,435 words
the bidding contest, and suffered the winner’s curse and failed in 2008. 17 Perhaps the best-known application of auction theory was in the spectrum auctions, in which the US and European governments derived extraordinarily large amounts of revenue from selling bandwidth to competing mobile phone operators. By this time, a
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small worlds rather than to empirical study of how these processes work in actual large worlds. Paul Klemperer, who was involved in the design of spectrum auctions for mobile networks in Britain and other countries, observed that ‘what really matters in auction design . . . is mostly good elementary economics. By contrast, most of
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, 28 Soros, George, 36 , 319–20 , 336 South Korea, chaebol of, 276 South Sea bubble, 315 Soviet Union, 276 , 279 , 280 , 281 Spanish flu, 57 spectrum auctions, 257 Spence, Michael, 254 Spencer, Herbert, 157–8 Sperber, Dan, 162 , 272 , 415 St Athanasius, 99 St Francis, 116 , 127 , 130 , 167 Stalin, Joseph, 25
Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure
by Tim Harford · 1 Jun 2011 · 459pp · 103,153 words
government, or perhaps from some more complex financial process. * Readers of The Undercover Economist may recall Klemperer as one of the designers of the 3G spectrum auctions.
Model Thinker: What You Need to Know to Make Data Work for You
by Scott E. Page · 27 Nov 2018 · 543pp · 153,550 words
past, the government had allocated spectrum rights to large companies for modest fees. A provision within the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993 allowed for auctioning the spectrum to raise money. The radio signal from a tower covers a geographic range. Therefore, the government sought to sell licenses for specific regions: Western
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procedures, to explain why institutions succeed or fail, and to predict outcomes. It has also been used to design a variety of institutions, including the spectrum auctions described in Chapter 2, as well as many online markets, governmental voting systems, and even the procedures that allocate space for projects on space shuttle
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2008 for a discussion of the ability of social science models to explain variation. 10 See Porter and Smith 2007 for a history on the spectrum auction. 11 See Squicciarini and Voigtländer 2015. See Mokyr 2002 for a full historical account of the importance of knowledge transfer. 12 See www.treasury.gov
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. “A Spatial Model for Legislative Roll Call Analysis.” American Journal of Political Science 29, no. 2: 357–384. Porter, David, and Vernon Smith. 2007. “FCC Spectrum Auction Design: A 12-Year Experiment.” Journal of Law, Economics, and Policy 3, no. 1: 63–80. Powell, Robert. 1991. “Absolute and Relative Gains in International
Politics on the Edge: The Instant #1 Sunday Times Bestseller From the Host of Hit Podcast the Rest Is Politics
by Rory Stewart · 13 Sep 2023 · 534pp · 157,700 words
the whips didn’t yet quite understand. The government was horrified because they believed the new targets would lose them billions in their next auction of the spectrum for mobile licences. A little later they decided that this constitutional convention could be ignored and they would pay no attention to this kind
Who Gets What — and Why: The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design
by Alvin E. Roth · 1 Jun 2015 · 282pp · 80,907 words
Rembrandt painting, since it can be divided and combined in lots of ways for different uses. When Congress ruled that the Federal Communications Commission should auction off spectrum licenses, it specified that the goal would be selling those licenses in a way that allocated them to the most valuable uses. The FCC
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eBay auctions. But if everyone waited, the information needed to produce an efficient allocation wouldn’t be transmitted. To avoid this, the design for the spectrum auction included activity rules, proposed by my colleagues Paul Milgrom and Bob Wilson, to prevent bidders from making late bids unless they had made bids on
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–92 Prohibition, 197–98, 213 property rights, 192, 222 protected transactions, 198 Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, The (Weber), 200–201 radio spectrum license auctions, 185–89 real estate markets, 111 easy vs. hard matches in, 47–48 packages in, 186 real estate brokers in, 224–25 Redfin, 225 Rees
Free Ride
by Robert Levine · 25 Oct 2011 · 465pp · 109,653 words
.C., headquarters, a block from K Street’s lobbyist offices, the White House economic policy adviser Lawrence Summers announced an Obama administration plan to auction off spectrum to wireless broadband companies. It will free up space for more mobile Internet traffic, which Summers said would spur economic growth and generate employment opportunities
The Undercover Economist: Exposing Why the Rich Are Rich, the Poor Are Poor, and Why You Can Never Buy a Decent Used Car
by Tim Harford · 15 Mar 2006 · 389pp · 98,487 words
quite unable to work out what the optimal strategy was for bidding in the auction. The difficulty—which is a challenge for bidders in many auctions, including spectrum auctions—is that the two victims just didn’t know the value of what they were bidding for. They knew part of the value
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they knew how much money had been in their own wallet. But each knew nothing about the contents of the other’s wallet. In a spectrum auction, the prob- • 162 • T H E M E N W H O K N E W T H E V A L U E O
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mistakes: new ones will continue to be discovered the hard way. Why use an auction? When the UK government started to consider using an auction to sell spectrum rights, they were taking a bold step. After initial success, the US auctions had fallen apart because the game theory used to construct them
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. $400,000. $500,000. What’s happening? You can scarcely believe it. This unexpected turn of events is similar to what happened in the UK spectrum auction, except the stakes were ten thousand times higher: not £300,000 but £3 billion. For a week, the bidding went smoothly; the rules about continuous
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: D. C. Heath, 1992). This is the same Ken Binmore who later went on to lead the auction design team for the UK 3G auction. The United States spectrum auctions are expertly discussed in John McMillan’s “Selling Spectrum Rights,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 8, no. 3 (Summer 1994): 145–62; also
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contem-porary press. Paul Klemperer’s Auctions: Theory and Practice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), especially chapter 6, contains a wealth of material on the spectrum auctions. The book describes (187) analysts’ forecasts of the auction revenues (£2–5bn); the auction raised five to ten times this amount. It also contains Klemperer
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irrigation projects, 193–97 and starting positions, 73 and poverty, 193–97, 197–200, sustainable competitive advantage, 228–30 19 dictatorships, 182–86, 187 UK spectrum auction, 169 digital media, 53 complexity of economic systems, 2, diminishing returns, 180 10, 14, 65, 66 discounts, 36, 56 computer industry, 51–52, 80 disease
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, 39–40 supermarkets, 40–42 • 271 • I N D E X prices ( continued) reforms and trade barriers, 225 in China, 236, 245, 247, 249 UK spectrum auction, 170–73 and development, 199, 230 privatization, 244–45 of trade barriers, 226 probability theory, 157–59 regional pricing, 53 product differentiation, 39, 47, 65
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–51, special economic zones, 248–49 152–54 special interests, 224–28 and profits, 32, 245 Spectrum, 171 and rents, 9–11, 15–18, 32 spectrum auctions. See radio Ricardo on, 8–11 spectrum rights and stock values, 149–51, 152 speculation, 145–49 and technology, 152–54 Spence, Michael, 116–18
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, 127, 133 immigration, 28 Vodafone, 173, 174 industrial revolution, 233 Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO), infrastructure, 183 190 railroads, 151 Von Neumann, John, 156, 158, 161– spectrum auctions, 163, 165–68, 62, 167, 175 168–73, 173–75 vouchers, 90 taxation, 82 unions, 26 wages, 24–26, 67, 94 wealth inequality, 89 The
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, 233 in China, 233, 252 infrastructure, 183 and development, 197–98 pollution, 81, 221 and fairness, 75 and special interests, 227 and nonmarket economies, 69 spectrum rights auctions, 159–61, and price sensitivity, 38 165 and taxation, 71–72 taxation, 82 in the US and UK, 89 • 275 • I N D E
In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
by Steven Levy · 12 Apr 2011 · 666pp · 181,495 words
that it changed even Milgrom’s way of thinking. “Once I saw this from Google, I began seeing it everywhere,” he says, citing examples in spectrum auctions, diamond markets, and the competition between Kenyan and Rwandan coffee beans. “I’ve begun to realize that Google somehow or other introduced a level of
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Cerf, a renowned figure in the development of the net.) But Whitt also alerted the company to an opportunity: the FCC’s early 2008 auction of wireless spectrum. Up for bid were some valuable slices of the airwaves that would host the next generation of mobile communications, allowing faster Internet access, not
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that would destroy its business model.”) The board okayed the bid, and on Thursday, January 24, 2008, Google’s $4.71 billion bid made the spectrum auction official. At that moment Google owned the valuable C block licenses. It still owned them the next day and through the weekend, as no other
Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach
by Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig · 14 Jul 2019 · 2,466pp · 668,761 words
happen in secret backroom deals or tacitly, within the rules of the mechanism. For example, in 1999, Germany auctioned ten blocks of cellphone spectrum with a simultaneous auction (bids were taken on all ten blocks at the same time), using the rule that any bid must be a minimum of a 10
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equivalence theorem was developed independently by Myerson (1981) and Riley and Samuelson (1981). Two economists, Milgrom (1997) and Klemperer (2002), write about the multibillion-dollar spectrum auctions they were involved in. Mechanism design is used in multiagent planning (Hunsberger and Grosz, 2000; Stone et al., 2009) and scheduling (Rassenti et al., 1982
What Would Google Do?
by Jeff Jarvis · 15 Feb 2009 · 299pp · 91,839 words
-Mobile released the first). In an effort to push the Federal Communications Commission and the mobile phone industry toward openness, Google bid in an auction of wireless spectrum in 2008, making a bargain with the government: Google would guarantee a minimum price of $4.6 billion if the FCC required openness—that
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