2002
DOI: 10.1111/1468-0297.00020
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The Biggest Auction Ever: The Sale of the British 3G Telecom Licences

Abstract: This paper reviews the part played by economists in organising the British third‐generation mobile‐phone licence auction that concluded on 27 April 2000. It raised £22½ billion ($34 billion or 2½% of GNP) and was widely described at the time as the biggest auction ever. We discuss the merits of auctions versus `beauty contests', the aims of the auction, the problems we faced, the auction designs we considered, and the mistakes that were made.

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Cited by 325 publications
(167 citation statements)
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References 27 publications
(46 reference statements)
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“…Licences for third generation mobile phone bandwidth had been auctioned, giving the Government a £22 billion windfall. (The economists involved in its design trumpeted it as "the biggest auction ever" (Binmore and Klemperer, 2002)). As the stakes rose, so the NRPB's lack of control became clearer.…”
Section: Opening Upmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Licences for third generation mobile phone bandwidth had been auctioned, giving the Government a £22 billion windfall. (The economists involved in its design trumpeted it as "the biggest auction ever" (Binmore and Klemperer, 2002)). As the stakes rose, so the NRPB's lack of control became clearer.…”
Section: Opening Upmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Implementation theory in the context of auctions is one such relatively new application of the game theoretic approach and it has yielded some significant results. One of the best known examples of its use is the auction of the UK Radio Spectrum (Binmore and Klemperer, 2002). The contribution made by game theoretic approaches to the design of policy -so-called "mechanism design", whereby sustainable, albeit second best solutions to economic and social problems (Binmore, 2007) can be sought -has in fact been developing for around three decades.…”
Section: Implicating Game Theory?mentioning
confidence: 99%
“…It attracted a serious bid from a new entrant and shocked analysts with revenues of D 95 per capita, which almost double most expectations. See Klemperer (2002), and Binmore and Klemperer (2002) for more details. 10 In a recent empirical work, Caputo Silva and Kahn (2001) investigate heterogeneity across different categories of bidders and find evidence that suggests the importance of private components in bidders valuations in Brazilian auctions.…”
Section: The Modelmentioning
confidence: 99%