Award for auctions

This year's Nobel is for actual economic policy design

The Nobel prize for economics is typically awarded to economists who have broken new ground in a particular sector of the discipline, or who have pioneered specific methods of investigation or analysis. The 2020 iteration of the award does this, but in fact also rewards a specific, incredibly influential act of policy design: The 1993-94 auction by the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) of telecommunications spectrum. The FCC picked up the suggestion made by the 2020 laureates, Paul Milgrom and Robert Wilson, and created a specific auction design based on then-recent advances in game theory that provided an efficient