On 29 February, DotEcon Partner Dr Dan Maldoom presented a report on raising revenue in spectrum auctions at the Asia-Pacific Workshop of the GSMA World Mobile Conference.
The potential for raising revenue through spectrum auctions was highlighted by the Indian government setting revenue-raising as an explicit objective for the award of 3G and BWA spectrum by auction. Thes auctions took place in Q2 of 2010 and together raised US$22.7 billion. While the revenue-raising objective would appear to be in contrast to the efficiency objective of spectrum awards in Europe, both objectives are equivalent provided that downstream competition is safeguarded, with revenue being generated as a by-product of producing an efficient allocation.
The paper highlights that while it may be possible to modify auction rules to increase revenues at the margin, large deviations from standard auction methodologies in order to raise additional revenues could have unintended consequences that may in fact reduce auction revenues. The report can be downloaded here and the slides presenting a summary of the report can be downloaded here.
DotEcon designed the Indian 3G and BWA auctions in order to meet the auction objectives set by the Indian government and provided software for its implementation.