Incentive auctions: absence is as notable as presence

One of the themes in our new Spectrum Auctions Dossier is the evolution of formats. The combinatorial clock auction has declined in popularity and recent years have been mostly been notable for minor modifications of an existing approaches.

But there has been one truly revolutionary development: the incentive auction. The US pioneered this for 600 MHz in 2016 and it has been used successfully again in 39 GHz this year.

But why has this remained a US-only phenomenon? The FCC has even offered to make the software available without charge.

We discuss the reasons in this Dossier article.