Market Mechanisms for Allocation of Spectrum

Suny At Buffalo, Amherst NY

Investigators

Abstract

Wireless broadband technology is now a vital part of our daily lives and plays a crucial role in industrial competitiveness. Thus, ensuring an efficient relocation of spectrums to meet the exploding demands will be an important public policy agenda for years to come. To achieve this objective, there have been significant innovations in market design such as simultaneous ascending auctions, package auctions, and incentive auctions. Nevertheless, the information about the public policy issue and market design algorithms are not yet widely available and the lack of information creates barriers in education, research, public awareness, and policy formation. The PI and the development team will leverage their multi-disciplinary and cross-domain expertise in economics and computer science to address these challenges. The goals of this project are to provide: 1) a software that implements prototypes of major spectrum allocation algorithms, 2) detailed information about their definition, theoretical properties, empirical application, and experimental results, 3) tutorials and lesson plans for the spectrum allocation policy and the role of public policy, 4) case studies of spectrum allocation policies in the US, Europe, and Asia describing the application of economic theory, data analysis, and policy decisions, and 5) experimental and theoretical studies of the spectrum allocation mechanism employing the software. In the short term, this project will enable educators to develop courses for the spectrum allocation policy and market designs, students to actually work with these mechanisms, researchers in labs and in the field to conduct experiments and simulate auction outcomes, and policy makers to understand current best practices in the spectrum policy. In the long term, the outcomes of this research will improve public awareness of the spectrum policy.