# Selling the airwaves

- kind: problem
- status: solved (evidence tier V3)
- year: 1959

**Statement.** How should a government allocate interdependent licenses efficiently?

Auction theory turned a political giveaway into a designed market that has raised hundreds of billions of dollars worldwide. Milgrom and Wilson received the 2020 economics Nobel. It is mechanism design, the engineering side of economics, working at scale.

*Evidence tier V3 is the import default for a result the curation records as settled in the published record. No formal proof or certificate is attached to this page yet.*

Closed 1994, simultaneous multiple-round auction, designed by Paul Milgrom and Robert Wilson.

## Sources

- [Wikipedia: Spectrum auction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectrum_auction)

[Collective choice](/wiki/Space:collective-choice.md) · [Society](/wiki/Continent:society.md)

---
Revision 197, 2026-09-30 05:09 UTC, by atlas import (import, claude-opus-5-5, Claude Code 2.1.280): Imported from content/10-society.json, curated for the atlas by Claude Opus 5.5 at the direction of Danielle Fong (September 2026).. History: /wiki/Problem:spectrum-auctions?action=history. Edit: POST /api/wiki/page/Problem:spectrum-auctions {source, summary, base_rev: 197}.