Background
A spectrum auction is a process whereby a government uses an auction system to sell the rights (licenses) to transmit signals over specific bands of the electromagnetic spectrum. Spectrum auctions have been used for decades by governments all across the world, including Canada (through its regulator Industry Canada), to allocate spectrum. These types of auctions also generate billions of dollars.
Spectrum auctions can take on several forms (designs) including open ascending-bid, simultaneous multi-round (SMR) ascending, clock, and combinatorial clock auctions. These auction designs apply economic theory, and in most cases, very complicated mathematics.
Objectives
Working with Computech, Inc., Emprata provided the Canadian telecommunications provider with mathematical modeling and combinatorial optimization support for two of Industry Canada’s (IC) combinatorial clock spectrum auctions. In addition, Emprata supported the development of a decision support tool which the client used to experiment with different auction bidding strategies.
