We report on the design and testing of three auction mechanisms to maximize revenue and efficiency in the sale of two vintages of nitrous oxide emission allowances by the Commonwealth of Virginia in 2004. The three mechanisms considered were a combinatorial sealed bid (CSB) auction, a sequential...

In “The Federal Communications Commission,” Ronald Coase exposed deep theoretical foundations via normative argument. The government controlled scarce frequencies; spillovers were said to be otherwise endemic. Coase saw that regulators limited conflicts by restricting uses and that property...

In this paper we present a new improved design for multi-object auctions and report on the results of tests of that design. We merge the better features of two extant but very different auction processes, the Milgrom FCC design (see Milgrom (1995)) and the Adaptive User Selection Mechanism...