Over 13 months in 2016-17 the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) conducted an "incentive auction" to repurpose radio spectrum from broadcast television to wireless internet. The result of the auction was to remove 14 UHF-TV channels from broadcast use, sell 70 MHz of wireless internet licenses for $19.8 billion, and create 14 MHz of spectrum for unlicensed uses. With fewer UHF channels remaining for TV broadcast, the TV spectrum was also reorganized. Each station was either "repacked" in the leftover channels or voluntarily sold its broadcast rights, either going off the air or switching to a different band. The volunteers received a total of $10.05 billion to yield or exchange their rights and make repacking possible.

No abstract available.

We study auctions with severe bounds on the communication allowed: each bidder may only transmit t bits of information to the auctioneer. We consider both welfare- and profit-maximizing auctions under this communication restriction. For both measures, we determine the optimal auction and show that the loss incurred relative to unconstrained auctions is mild. We prove non-surprising properties of these kinds of auctions, e.g., that in optimal mechanisms bidders simply report the interval in which their valuation lies in, as well as some surprising properties, e.g., that asymmetric auctions are better than symmetric ones and that multi-round auctions reduce the communication complexity only by a linear factor.