FCC hires top economists

As the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) moves to implement its new authority to sell valuable radio spectrum via incentive auctions, it is seeking advice from a group of economists with expertise in auction design and competition policy.

The commission has retained a group of prize-winning economists led by Paul Milgrom, the Ely Professor of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University. Milgrom, who is considered one of the foremost thinkers in auction theory and design, helped the FCC create its first spectrum auctions — which have served as a blueprint for similar auctions around the world.

Milgrom will be assisted by Professors Jonathan Levin and Ilya Segal, also of Stanford. Levin chairs the university's economics department, and is a winner of the prestigious John Bates Clark medal, an award for young economists whose winners often go on to win the Nobel Prize in economics. Segal is a recipient of the Compass-Lexecon prize, which is awarded to significant contributors to the understanding and implementation of competition policy.

The Stanford professors will be joined by Washington, D.C., based Lawrence Ausubel, an auction design expert who teaches at the University of Maryland.

In a Tuesday statement, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski called the upcoming auctions an "historic undertaking" and said he is "delighted" the commission will be advised by such a "world class team of experts." The commission hopes to ensure that the auctions will be an "effective market mechanism," he said, which could potentially "unleash more spectrum for mobile broadband and help address the looming spectrum crunch."

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