ABSTRACT
Economic approaches and valuations have played an increasing role in spectrum policy and management since the last decade of the 20th century. This chapter analyses the role spectrum assignment policies and explores in what way the design of spectrum awards from now on should give centre place to promoting ubiquitous infrastructure deployment and maximising “social value”. The high-level, often repeated, argument that auctions are an effective process to select those operators that can use the frequencies most valuably is as hard to verify as it is to falsify. Spectrum auction studies in the first decade of the 21st century have failed to address what they were meant to research, i.e. the impact of spectrum assignment design on industry development, competition and contribution to the overall economic growth. The means have superseded the aims, and a “successful” auction in the literature has been taken as one achieving high fees rather than positive social returns.
