In Watt v. Energy Action Educational Foundation, the Supreme Court rebutted a challenge to the federal government's mix of 'nontraditional' outer continental shelf lease-auction mechanisms authorized under the 1978 OCS Amendments. The issues of this case addressed here include: the economic intent of the congressional language; incentive properties of various of the authorized auction processes; methodological shortcomings inherent in the implicit congressional directive for field experimentation; and, the usefulness of laboratory experimental economics in answering relevant auction-policy questions. The discussion of experimental economics includes evidence already gained from laboratory experiments relating to hypotheses about auction-market performance.