案例库 · 战略与领导 · 战略决策 · 2000
这条还没译成中文，下面是英文原文。
Britain auctioned 3G spectrum and raised £22.5bn — the biggest auction ever
One transparent ascending auction for five mobile licences raised £22.5bn in 2000 — about 2.5% of UK GNP and £380 per citizen.
Radiocommunications Agency
那一手
In 2000 Britain had to award five third-generation mobile licences worth billions of pounds. Radio spectrum is scarce, and the design choice was political as well as technical: overpaying would be a scandal, but so would selling cheap.
The Radiocommunications Agency hired auction theorists Ken Binmore and Paul Klemperer. They chose one simultaneous ascending auction for all five licences, with refundable deposits to filter unserious bidders and activity rules that forced bidders to bid consistently as prices rose.
Bidding ran from 6 March to 27 April 2000 and raised £22.5bn ($34bn) — about 2.5% of UK GNP, roughly £380 per citizen. The sale itself cost £8.1m, under 0.1% of proceeds, and was widely called the biggest auction ever.
The National Audit Office later credited the result to strong competition enabled by a design suited to the UK market — and warned that auction designs cannot be transplanted mechanically from one environment to another.
为什么管用
- Deposits make entry cheap enough to attract bidders but costly enough to filter out the unserious.
- Activity rules stop bidders from parking cheaply, so the price reflects real competition.
- A transparent, simple design reduces the fear of being cheated, which keeps bidders bidding.
可以搬走什么
Fit the auction to the market. Deposits kept unserious bidders out and activity rules forced consistency, so genuine competition set a £22.5bn price — 2.5% of UK GNP.
后来呢
The proceeds went to the Treasury, and the auction became a reference point for spectrum sales worldwide — a demonstration that institutional design, not just market forces, decides what a scarce public asset fetches.
资料来源
- Radiocommunications Agency: The Auction of Radio Spectrum for the Third Generation of Mobile Telephones
- The Biggest Auction Ever: the Sale of the British 3G Telecom Licences
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