Understanding Strategies in the Combinatorial Clock Auction: The Case of Canada's 700 MHz Auction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Industry Canada, the authority charged with radio spectrum allocation and assignment in Canada, administered a Combinatorial Clock Auction in 2014 whereby a sizable number of spectrum licenses were awarded to a handful of telecommunications operators to provide 4G cellular service throughout the Canadian provinces.The auction format, the Combinatorial Clock Auction (CCA), is now increasingly replacing the Simultaneous Multiple Round Auction (SMRA) as the preferred method to assign commercial radio spectrum. The CCA has been used in several countries by spectrum authorities to assign spectrum bands for cellular (4G) services and wireless broadband.In its essential design the Canadian CCA consists of two main stages: the Allocation stage and the Assignment stage; in turn the allocation stage is further divided in two: the Clock Rounds and the Supplementary Round. This paper discusses the main features of the CCA and highlights some of the differences with other previously used formats. Next, it uses an extensive repository of data from the results of Canada’s 700 MHz auction in order to analyse the strategic aspects of auction participants' bids occurred during the first stage of the auction, known as the Clock Rounds. Data is publicly available, posted by Industry Canada, and traces every bidder’s demand history throughout the auction represented by the round-to-round demanded bundles and the aggregate bid (bid price) for each bundle. Bidding data also shows a bidder's eligibility and activity levels, two important auction measurements of activity that constrain a bidder's behaviour.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".