It would be hard to exaggerate how unlikely these developments seemed in 1993. Then, as now, the status of game theory within economics was a hotly debated topic. Auction theory, which generated its main predictions by treating auctions as games, had inherited the controversy. At the 1985 World Congress of the Econometric Society, a debate erupted between researchers studying bargaining, who were skeptical that game theory could explain much about bargaining or be useful for improving bargaining protocols, and those investigating in auctions and industrial organization, who believed that game theory was illuminating their studies. Although game theory gained increasing prominence throughout the 1980s and had begun to influence the leading graduate textbooks by the early 1990s, there was no consensus about its relevance in 1994, when the Federal Communications Commission conducted the first of the new spectrum auctions.