The radio spectrum suitable for commercial wireless services is limited. A portion of the radio spectrum has been reserved for institutions using it for non-commercial purposes such as federal agencies, defense, public safety bodies and scientific institutions. In order to operate efficiently, these incumbents need clean spectrum access. However, commercial users also want access, and granting them access may materially interfere with the existing activity of the incumbents. Conventional market based mechanisms for allocating scarce resources in this context are problematic. Allowing direct monetary transfers to and from public or scientific institutions risks distorting their non-commercial mission. Moreover, often only the incumbent knows the exact value of the interference it experiences, and, likewise, only commercial users can predict accurately the expected monetary outcome from sharing the resource. Thus, our problem is to determine the efficient allocation of resources in the presence of private information without the use of direct monetary transfers. The problem is not unique to spectrum. Other resources that governments hold in trust share the same feature. We propose a novel mechanism design formulation of the problem, characterize the optimal mechanism and describe some of its qualitative properties.

翻译：适用于商业无线服务的无线电频谱资源是有限的。部分无线电频谱已被保留给非商业用途的机构使用，例如联邦机构、国防部门、公共安全机构和科研院所。为实现高效运作，这些既有用户需要纯净的频谱接入。然而，商业用户同样希望获得接入权限，而授予其接入权可能会实质性地干扰既有用户的现有活动。在此背景下，传统的基于市场的稀缺资源分配机制存在缺陷。允许公共或科研机构直接进行货币转移可能扭曲其非商业使命。此外，通常只有既有用户自身清楚其所受干扰的确切价值，同样地，也只有商业用户能准确预测共享资源所能带来的预期货币收益。因此，我们的问题在于：如何在存在私有信息且不使用直接货币转移的情况下，确定资源的有效分配方案。该问题并非频谱领域所独有。政府以信托形式持有的其他资源也具有相同特征。我们针对该问题提出了一种新颖的机制设计框架，刻画了最优机制的特征，并描述了其若干定性性质。