This book synthesizes the insights I have found from my teaching, research, and consulting about auction design. For me, the three have long been intertwined. I wrote my Ph.D. thesis about auction theory under the guidance of Robert Wilson, who was then already advising bidders how to bid and governments about how to design auctions. Fifteen years later, Wilson and I together made proposals that became the basis for the design of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) spectrum auctions – the most influential new auction design of the twentieth century. The FCC design was copied with variations for spectrum sales on six continents. In the intervening years, I had often taught about auction theory, though not yet as the practical subject that it was to become.

Work on this book began in spring of 1995, when I delivered the Churchill lectures at Cambridge University. Those lectures emphasized the history and design of the spectrum auctions run by the FCC beginning in 1994, as well as the bidders' experiences in the auctions. Wilson and I had only a few weeks in which to form our design and make recommendations, and my “Churchill project” was to complete the analysis of those recommendations by identifying the kinds of environments in which our new design was likely to be effective. Events caused the project to be delayed, but the project received a boost and a twist when I delivered lectures about auction theory in courses at Stanford in 1996 and 2000, in Jerusalem in 1997, and at Harvard and MIT in 2001 and 2002.