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Spectrum Markets-3: Market Signals without Mission Distortion: Auction Design for Scientific Spectrum Incumbents
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Market Signals without Mission Distortion: Auction Design for Scientific Spectrum Incumbents Northwestern University, United States of America Satellite constellations now transmit over many radio telescopes on Earth, while the spectrum reserved for science generates no market signal about its value. The mechanisms that could produce such a signal tie the incumbent's revenue to its spectrum decisions. For many scientific incumbents, monetary compensation is not lawfully available at all. This paper asks whether a regulator can obtain a market signal without pushing a scientific incumbent to behave like a revenue-maximizing firm. We map a range of models between full protection and full monetization, ordered by what the incumbent is permitted to hold. From the middle of that range we develop repeated second-price auctions over parcels of access, with the observatory compensated in non-transferable, non-convertible bidding credits. We specify what the scientific incumbent maximizes, which this literature has generally left implicit. The observatory selects which campaigns to protect, maximizing expected scientific yield under a credit budget. It ranks them with the cardinal scores its committee already produces. Interference in these bands is close to all-or-nothing, so the implied bid is the committee's score on the campaigns a sale would harm, divided by the shadow price of the budget. That shadow price is posted before the season and tested against the record it then generates. A scoring extension prices the quality of interference by reducing each bid by the harm the bidder's emission class threatens. Because that report carries only a classification, the observatory files the truth at every realization of demand and against any number of opponents, whenever its balance can pay. Within the family of conventions we analyze, a posted exchange rate accompanies an honest report while a filed rate accompanies a recovered one, and no member delivers both. The ledger disciplines the posted rate, and we bound the pull self-interest can exert on it under conditions we state.
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