Effective and Equitable Adoption of Opt-In Residential Dynamic Electricity Pricing

Time-varying retail electricity pricing is very popular with economists, but has little support among regulators and consumers. I propose an opt-in time-varying residential pricing plan that would be equitable to both customers who opt in and those who don’t. Low-income households would, on average, see almost no change in their bills under time-varying pricing, while low-consumption households would see their bills decline somewhat and high-consumption households would see their bills rise. Most importantly, I show that the opt-in approach is unlikely to increase the flat rate charged to other customers by more than a few percentage points.     

Exercising Market Power in Proprietary Aftermarkets

Over 20 recent antitrust cases have turned on whether competition in complex durable-equipment markets prevents manufacturers from exercising market power over proprietary aftermarket products and services. We show that the price in the aftermarket will exceed marginal cost despite competition in the equipment market. Absent perfectly contingent long-term contracts, firms will balance the advantages of marginal-cost pricing to future generations of consumers against the payoff from monopoly pricing for current, locked-in equipment owners. The result holds for undifferentiated Bertrand competition, differentiated duopoly, and monopoly equipment markets. We also examine the effects of market growth and equipment durability.     

Career Concerns,Inaction and Market Inefficiency: Evidence From Utility Regulation

We study how incentive conflicts known as ‘career concerns’ can generate inefficiencies not only within firms but also in market outcomes. Career concerns may lead agents to avoid actions that, while value‐increasing in expectation, could potentially be associated with a bad outcome. We apply this theory to natural gas procurement by regulated public utilities and show that career concerns may lead to a reduction in surplus‐increasing market transactions during periods when the benefits of trade are likely to be greatest. We show that data from natural gas markets are consistent with this prediction and difficult to explain using alternative theories.     

An Empirical Analysis of the Potential for Market Power in California's Electricity Industry

Using historical cost data, we simulate the California electricity market after deregulation as a static Cournot market with a competitive fringe. Our model indicates that, under the pre-deregulation structure of generation ownership, there is potential for significant market power in high demand hours, particularly in the fall and early winter months when hydroelectric output is at its lowest level relative to demand. The results also show that two of the most important factors in determining the extent and severity of market power are the level of available hydroelectric production and the elasticity of demand.     

A Lagrangian heuristic for the real-time vehicle rescheduling problem

When a public transit vehicle breaks down on a scheduled trip, one or more vehicles need to be rescheduled to serve that trip and other service trips originally scheduled for the disabled vehicle. In this paper, the vehicle rescheduling problem (VRSP) is investiaged to consider operating costs, schedule disruption costs, and trip cancellation costs. The VRSP is proven to be NP-hard, and a Lagrangian relaxation based insertion heuristic is developed. Extensive computational experiments on randomly generated problems are reported. The results show that the Lagrangian heuristic performs very well for solving the VRSP.     

Do investors forecast fat firms? Evidence from the gold‐mining industry

Conventional economic theory assumes that firms minimize costs given output, but news articles and managers indicate that firms cut costs when they are in economic distress and grow fat when they are relatively wealthy. Under conventional theory, firm value is convex in the price of a competitively supplied input or output, but we find that the stock values of many gold‐mining companies are concave in the price of gold. We show that this is consistent with fat accumulation when a firm grows wealthy. We then address alternative explanations and discuss where fat in these companies might reside.