Introduction
As promised last week, in today’s column I shall introduce readers to the second of two studies that focus on the evaluation of public auctioning of oil rights. That is, Professor Cramton’s famed assessment entitled, “How to Auction Oil Rights, 2005”. This is a synthesizing survey of the research work on the topic and is aimed at emerging petrostates like Guyana. It blends together well with the Sen and Chakravarty empirical evaluation of India’s experience with oil block auctions over an extended period. Similar to last week I rely closely on this study in my presentation, mainly in order to avoid errors in translation, as it were.