Evan Kwerel on the Origins of Spectrum Auctions

Two Think Minimum

Today, we are delighted to have as our guest, Evan Kwerel, who is Senior Economic Advisor at the Federal Communications Commission. The impact of Evan's career at the FCC was recognized last year, when he was awarded the 2021 Paul Volcker Career Achievement Award for pioneering the use of spectrum auctions. To get an idea of what Evan has accomplished and to introduce the discussion, let me read the first couple of paragraphs from the citation. “During more than three decades as a Federal Communications Commission economist, Evan Kwerel has been a key driver of America’s wireless revolution, establishing the first-ever competitive auctions to allocate public airwaves for the transmission of sound, data, and video across the country while raising billions of dollars for the government. The market-based FCC auctions of electromagnetic spectrum, the radio frequencies that carry voices between cell phones, television shows from broadcasters and online information from one computer to the next, were conceived and implemented by Kwerel based on many of the theories of 2020 Nobel Prize-winning economists Paul Milgrom and Bob Wilson. Since the early 1990s, a total of 107 FCC spectrum auctions have generated more than $200 billion in revenue for the government. After winning the Nobel Prize, Milgrom wrote that ‘Evan’s individual contributions were so major that it would have been appropriate for him to share this prize.’”