The team that wins the most spectrum usually loses
Every time I run an auction simulation with a new group, someone walks out with the biggest portfolio and the worst result. There is a structural reason for it, and it is not inexperience.
I have now run a live auction simulation with enough different groups to be confident about one pattern. In almost every session, the team that acquires the most spectrum finishes near the bottom on surplus.
The people involved are not naive. They are frequently the ones who prepared most carefully. Something about the format does this to them, and it is worth naming.
Winning a lot is easy
In an ascending auction, acquiring spectrum is the one thing entirely within your control. If you keep bidding, you will win. Every round gives you a clear, satisfying signal that you are succeeding, and that signal has nothing to do with whether you are succeeding.
Surplus is the difference between what a block is worth to you and what you paid. It is invisible during the auction. Nobody sees it until the end. So participants optimise the thing they can see.
Exposure does the rest
The second mechanism is exposure. In a multi-unit auction where blocks are worth more together than separately, a team that needs three contiguous blocks is in trouble the moment they win one at a price that only makes sense if they get all three.
Now every subsequent round is a choice between paying too much and stranding what they already hold. The rational move once you are exposed is often to keep going, which is exactly how a sensible team ends up with a portfolio they cannot justify.
The error was not the last bid. It was the first one, made before they knew whether the set was achievable.
Denial is where the money goes
The third pattern is the most human. Teams bid on blocks they do not want in order to stop a rival having them.
Sometimes this is correct. A rival with contiguous holdings across a band may genuinely be worse for you than the cost of denying it. But in practice, denial bidding is usually retaliation dressed as strategy, and it is enormously expensive, because you have deliberately entered a contest for something you have valued at close to nothing.
The tell is that nobody who does this can state, afterwards, what the denial was worth. If you cannot put a number on it, you were not buying denial. You were annoyed.
What good teams do differently
The teams that win on surplus behave in a recognisably different way.
They decide before the auction opens what they will not do, and they write it down. A walk-away price per block, and a rule about which combinations are acceptable.
They treat the plan as a constraint rather than a suggestion, which sounds obvious and is very hard at round fourteen when a rival has just taken a block they wanted.
And they are comfortable leaving with less. The best outcome I have seen was a team that acquired the second smallest portfolio in the room, paid well under their valuation for all of it, and could explain every bid they made.
Why simulate rather than teach
I could explain all of this in twenty minutes and it would not take.
The reason to run it as a live game is that the pressure is real. The countdown is real, the rival bids are real, and the moment where you realise you are one block short of something that matters is genuinely uncomfortable. People remember what they felt during that. They do not remember slide fourteen.