I got hooked into auctions through interactions with Professor Richard Engelbrecht-Wiggans whose love for auctions rubbed off on me. I had left mathematics and statistics by that time (or more accurately mathematics and statistics had left me), and I realized that my training helped me analyze problems in auctions and say something interesting. It also helped me prove results easily. That would also turn out to be a bane for me which I realized much later.
In any case, I had read Vickrey's classic paper, then after some more papers I came across Milgrom and Weber (Econometrica, 1982) and McAfee and McMillan (Journal of Economic Literature, 1987). I did not need any further inspiration to work on auctions for my Ph.D. thesis. That was also the time when I read that R. Preston McAfee, Paul Milgrom, and Robert Wilson were developing and implementing the framework and rules for the now famous Radio Spectrum Auctions.
That was exciting time for auctions, and in spite of sitting far from the center of that action in Illinois, I started dreaming that I would be taking part in designing markets someday. Well, that did not happen, but at least I am lucky that I could find opportunities to learn and study auctions since then, and now I get to play the role of an educator of a beautiful subject - a role which is very satisfying in itself! I hope that you will find this subject fascinating, too!