A review of radio spectrum combinatorial clock auctions

Cryptographic Combinatorial Clock-Proxy Auctions

We present a cryptographic protocol for conducting efficient, provably-correct and secrecy-preserving combinatorial clock-proxy auctions. The “clock phase” functions as a trusted auction despite price discovery: bidders submit encrypted bids, and prove for themselves that they meet activity rules, and can compute total demand and thus verify price increases without revealing any information abo...

Gaming in Combinatorial Clock Auctions

In recent years, Combinatorial Clock Auctions (CCAs) have been used around the world to allocate frequency spectrum for mobile telecom licenses. CCAs are claimed to significantly reduce the scope for gaming or strategic bidding. In this paper, we show, however, that CCAs significantly enhance the possibilities for strategic bidding. Real bidders in telecom markets are not only interested in the...

Combinatorial Clock Auctions: Price Direction and Performance

This paper addresses three concerns with ascending price Combinatorial Clock Auctions (CCAs); price guidance toward efficiency relevant packages, computational burden, and susceptibility to collusive bidding. We propose a descending price Combinatorial Clock Auction (DCCA) with a newly devised pricing strategy to alleviate all of these concerns. Mimicking bidding behavior of human subjects foun...

Price Distortions in Combinatorial Clock Auctions, a Theoretical Perspective

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 efficie...