On Wednesday, Paul Milgrom will become the first Nobel economics laureate to win a television Emmy Award – and it’s not for narrating a documentary.
{{ Auctionomics is sharing its Emmy with the FCC, “for the creativity and engineering design of the FCC’s Broadcast Incentive Auction” — an event that enabled smartphone streaming to become ubiquitous.
- The auction, which took place in 2016, was hugely complex, but the underlying idea was simple: Instead of the government taking spectrum by eminent domain and risking years of lawsuits, it ran a so-called incentive auction, where the spectrum owners had a financial incentive to sell their spectrum rights.
- Those owners were some 50 different broadcasters, running more than 1,000 local TV stations that were occupying a part of the electromagnetic spectrum that would be much more valuable in the hands of wireless carriers. They ended up selling their spectrum for $10 billion. Meanwhile, the wireless carriers bought the spectrum for $19 billion, leaving more than $7 billion for the U.S. Treasury. }}
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