Last month, a workshop on the theory and practice of auctions took place in Tilburg. This meeting was organized by Hans Schumacher and Cédric Argenton, under the joint umbrella of the Royal Dutch Mathematical Society (KWG-ITW) and TILEC, with the generous support of the Econometrics and Operations Research Department at Tilburg University. TILEC director Eric van Damme offered an overview of the way auction theory developed over time. Advances, although stunning, were made only recently and the properties of many relevant auction designs are still unknown, as exemplified by the problems besetting the Dutch home care market. Jean-Jacques Herings (Maastricht University) discussed the desirable properties of the so-called bisection auction design (developed by Jean-Jacques and co-authors), in particular its speed, as measured by the number of bidding rounds it takes to reach the optimal allocation. Sven de Vries (University of Trier) introduced the audience to the use of discrete optimization techniques to study multi-unit auctions. Emiel Maasland (Erasmus University, Rotterdam) presented the (sophisticated) rules governing the auction of the 2.6GHz radio spectrum band to be held by the Dutch government in the near future. The meeting was well-attended and participants got a chance to experience the classical over-bidding effect in several laboratory experiments run by CentERlab director Jan Potters.