The Swiss UMTS Spectrum Auction Flop: Bad Luck or Bad Design

Elmar Wolfstetter ()

No CESifo Working Paper No. 534, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Group Munich

Abstract: This paper gives an account of events, and explains some systematic reasons of the UMTS auction flop in Switzerland. Apart from general market developments, which could not have been anticipated, we argue that auction design which was introduced in England and adopted in Switzerland and elsewhere is a cause of the disappointing performance of many UMTS auctions in Europe, of which Switzerland is just one particularly pronounced example. The regulator would have been better advised to import some key ingredients of the auction design employed in Germany and Austria. This would have assured higher revenue or more competition. The paper closes with several proposals on how one should conduct future spectrum auctions.

Keywords: spectrum auctions; telecommunications; industrial organization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D43 D44 D45 H20 L13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: Written
View list of references View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.cesifo-group.de/DocCIDL/cesifo_wp534.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: The Swiss UMTS Spectrum Auction Flop: Bad Luck or Bad Design?
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_534

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Group Munich
Address: Poschingerstrasse 5, 81679 Munich
Series data maintained by Julio Saavedra ().