We need a deliberative process that’s transparent, politically neutral, scientifically balanced, and representative of all relevant disciplines and expertise.
Image credit: Shutterstock/solarseven.
New Research In
Physical Sciences
Featured Portals
Articles by Topic
Biological Sciences
Featured Portals
Articles by Topic
Edited by Jose A. Scheinkman, Columbia University, New York, NY, and approved May 25, 2017 (received for review February 4, 2017)
Abstract
The recent “incentive auction” of the US Federal Communications Commission was the first auction to reallocate radio frequencies between two different kinds of uses: from broadcast television to wireless Internet access. The design challenge was not just to choose market rules to govern a fixed set of potential trades but also, to determine the broadcasters’ property rights, the goods to be exchanged, the quantities to be traded, the computational procedures, and even some of the performance objectives. An essential and unusual challenge was to make the auction simple enough for human participants while still ensuring that the computations would be tractable and capable of delivering nearly efficient outcomes.
Footnotes
↵1K.L.-B., P.M., and I.S. contributed equally to this work.
- ↵2To whom correspondence should be addressed. Email: milgrom{at}stanford.edu.
Author contributions: P.M. designed research; K.L.-B., P.M., and I.S. performed research; and K.L.-B., P.M., and I.S. wrote the paper.
Conflict of interest statement: P.M. led the team of consultants on behalf of Auctionomics, which was responsible for advising the Federal Communications Commission on the design of the incentive auction. K.L.-B. and I.S. were the two other members of the Auctionomics consulting team.
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
Designing a radio spectrum reallocation
Sign up for Article Alerts
Article Classifications
- Social Sciences
- Economic Sciences
- Physical Sciences
- Computer Sciences
Jump to section
You May Also be Interested in
Astronomers ostensibly know plenty about neutron stars. And yet, exactly what’s contained in these frequent precursors to black holes remains an open question.
Image credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
The tendency seems to allow miniaturized organisms to pack enough cells into a tiny form to build a complex physiology.
Image credit: Louis Paul Decena-Segarra.
Neural signatures of complex cognitive processing can occur in the absence of visual awareness, according to a case study of a person with distorted visual perception.
Carp can disperse their eggs via the digestive system of ducks, and dispersal of a single Prussian carp egg could establish a new population, according to a study.
Image credit: Sándor Borza (photographer).