The Dutch DCS-1800 Auction

In February 1998 the Dutch government auctioned licences to operate mobile telecommunications networks according to the DCS-1800 technology. Two “national” licences and sixteen “regional” ones were auctioned by using a variant of the simultaneous, multiple round auction that was proposed by US-economists and that had been tested in the US. This paper describes how the decision to auction came about, it details the auction rules, and it analyzes the resulting outcomes.