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Tragedy Of The Regulatory Commons: Lightsquared And The Missing Spectrum Rights, Thomas W. Hazlett, Brent Skorup
Tragedy Of The Regulatory Commons: Lightsquared And The Missing Spectrum Rights, Thomas W. Hazlett, Brent Skorup
Duke Law & Technology Review
The endemic underuse of radio spectrum constitutes a tragedy of the regulatory commons. Like other common interest tragedies, the outcome results from a legal or market structure that prevents economic actors from executing socially efficient bargains. In wireless markets, innovative applications often provoke claims by incumbent radio users that the new traffic will interfere with existing services. Sometimes these concerns are mitigated via market transactions, a la “Coasian bargaining.” Other times, however, solutions cannot be found even when social gains dominate the cost of spillovers. In the recent “LightSquared debacle,” such spectrum allocation failure played out. GPS interests that access …