FCC hires top economists

Milgrom will be assisted by Professors Jonathan Levin and Ilya Segal, also of Stanford. Levin chairs the university’s economics department, and is a winner of the prestigious John Bates Clark medal, an award for young economists whose winners often go on to win the Nobel Prize in economics. Segal is a recipient of the Compass-Lexecon prize, which is awarded to significant contributors to the understanding and implementation of competition policy.

The Stanford professors will be joined by Washington, D.C., based Lawrence Ausubel, an auction design expert who teaches at the University of Maryland.

{mosads}In a Tuesday statement, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski called the upcoming auctions an “historic undertaking” and said he is “delighted” the commission will be advised by such a “world class team of experts.” The commission hopes to ensure that the auctions will be an “effective market mechanism,” he said, which could potentially “unleash more spectrum for mobile broadband and help address the looming spectrum crunch.”