2 research outputs found
Assessing Economic Outcomes in Simulated Reverse Clock Auctions for Radio Spectrum
We investigate the economic outcomes that result under simulated bidder
behavior in a model of the FCC's reverse auction for radio spectrum. In our
simulations, limiting our notion of efficiency to the reverse auction in
isolation, the reverse clock auction achieves very efficient solutions, the
FCC's scoring rule greatly reduces the total payments to TV broadcasters at the
cost of some efficiency, and using a poor feasibility checker can have grave
consequences both in terms of the auction's cost and efficiency
Approximately Optimal Mechanism Design
Optimal mechanism design enjoys a beautiful and well-developed theory, and
also a number of killer applications. Rules of thumb produced by the field
influence everything from how governments sell wireless spectrum licenses to
how the major search engines auction off online advertising. There are,
however, some basic problems for which the traditional optimal mechanism design
approach is ill-suited---either because it makes overly strong assumptions, or
because it advocates overly complex designs. This survey reviews several common
issues with optimal mechanisms, including exorbitant communication,
computation, and informational requirements; and it presents several examples
demonstrating that passing to the relaxed goal of an approximately optimal
mechanism allows us to reason about fundamental questions that seem out of
reach of the traditional theory.Comment: Preprint; final version to appear in Annual Reviews of Economics,
August 2019. August 2020: Fixed small typo in funding info. arXiv admin note:
text overlap with arXiv:1406.677