Moving beyond L1/H1

The bigger takeaway from this year's Nobel winners is that an overhaul of public procurement processes in India is long overdue

1994 was the year that changed the way governments sell or buy resources. In that year, the United States Federal Communications Commission introduced a new way to sell radio spectrum to private telecom operators, based on the advice of, among others, economists Paul Milgrom and Robert Wilson. The duo won the Nobel Prize for economics this year for the kind of work that led to that landmark 1994 auction. Since 1994, over $200 billion has been raised by governments through such auctions. The research by Dr Milgrom and Dr Wilson have also transformed the ways in which governments across the