In comments to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) and The Rural Utilities Service (RUS), 71 economists explain why competitive procurement auctions should be used to allocate the $7.2 billion in broadband stimulus grants required by the recently enacted American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The economists’ comments explain “why procurement auctions are more efficient and more consistent with the stimulus goals of allocating funds quickly than a traditional grant review process.”
The signatories to this document are economists who have studied telecommunications, auctions, and competition policy. The list includes two Nobel Laureates and three winners of the John Bates Clark medal for the best economist under 40.
The comments were coordinated by Paul Milgrom, Gregory Rosston, and Andrzej Skrzypacz of Stanford University, and Scott Wallsten of the Technology Policy Institute. Thomas Lenard of TPI is one of the signers of the comments.
In their comments the economists noted, “While we may disagree about the stimulus package, we believe that it is important to implement mechanisms that make stimulus spending as efficient as possible. To that end, we have come together to encourage the NTIA and RUS to adopt auction mechanisms to allocate broadband stimulus grants”
Procurement Auctions for Broadband Stimulus
Thomas Lenard is Senior Fellow and President Emeritus at the Technology Policy Institute. Lenard is the author or coauthor of numerous books and articles on telecommunications, electricity, antitrust, privacy, e-commerce and other regulatory issues. His publications include Net Neutrality or Net Neutering: Should Broadband Internet Services Be Regulated?; The Digital Economy Fact Book; Privacy and the Commercial Use of Personal Information; Competition, Innovation and the Microsoft Monopoly: Antitrust in the Digital Marketplace; and Deregulating Electricity: The Federal Role.
Before joining the Technology Policy Institute, Lenard was acting president, senior vice president for research and senior fellow at The Progress & Freedom Foundation. He has served in senior economics positions at the Office of Management and Budget, the Federal Trade Commission and the Council on Wage and Price Stability, and was a member of the economics faculty at the University of California, Davis. He is a past president and chairman of the board of the National Economists Club.
Lenard is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin and holds a PhD in economics from Brown University. He can be reached at [email protected]
Scott Wallsten is President and Senior Fellow at the Technology Policy Institute and also a senior fellow at the Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy. He is an economist with expertise in industrial organization and public policy, and his research focuses on competition, regulation, telecommunications, the economics of digitization, and technology policy. He was the economics director for the FCC's National Broadband Plan and has been a lecturer in Stanford University’s public policy program, director of communications policy studies and senior fellow at the Progress & Freedom Foundation, a senior fellow at the AEI – Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies and a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, an economist at The World Bank, a scholar at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, and a staff economist at the U.S. President’s Council of Economic Advisers. He holds a PhD in economics from Stanford University.
