V Sridhar

Spectrum pricing for commercial mobile services: A cross country study

The Simultaneous Multiple Round Ascending (SMRA) Auction has become a defacto standard auction mechanism for the award of radio spectrum for commercial mobile services around the world. The winning bid price in such SMRA spectrum auctions is of interest, as it determines the valuation of the scarce resource by the mobile operators, and also indicates the revenue accrued to the governments as auction proceeds. This report uses a cross-country panel dataset to examine the determinants of spectrum prices of all the SMRA auctions held in 25 countries from 1994 to 2019.