Second-best pricing for incomplete market segments: Application to electricity pricing

Due to technological, political, or practical considerations, most price mechanisms are not fully differentiated by time, location, and contingency of delivery. Rate or tax designers then face a trade-off between the costs and benefits of using more complex price schedules. This paper studies the second-best problem of designing, for a given market segment, a linear pricing schedule with a limited number of distinct prices while facing exogenous constraints within a large and practically relevant family. Interestingly, we find that second-best prices may be computed using simple machine learning techniques. As an illustration, we apply our framework to retail electricity pricing in California.     

Rethinking real-time electricity pricing

Most US consumers are charged a near-constant retail price for electricity, despite substantial hourly variation in the wholesale market price. This paper evaluates the first program to expose residential consumers to hourly real-time pricing (RTP). I find that enrolled households are statistically significantly price elastic and that consumers responded by conserving energy during peak hours, but remarkably did not increase average consumption during off-peak times. The program increased consumer surplus by $10 per household per year. While this is only one to two percent of electricity costs, it illustrates a potential additional benefit from investment in retail Smart Grid applications, including the advanced electricity meters required to observe a household’s hourly consumption.     

The electricity market game

This paper examines the effects of imperfect competition in unregulated electricity markets from a general equilibrium perspective, and demonstrates that horizontal market power can explain both the large peak-period price spikes observed recently in California and elsewhere, and the marked reduction in addition to capacity that have also occurred during the transition to competitive markets.     

German stock market dynamics

This article estimates generalized ARCH (GARCH) models for German stock market indices returns, using weekly and monthly data, various GARCH specifications and (non)normal error densities, and a variety of diagnostic checks. German stock return series exhibit significant levels of second-order dependence. Our results clearly demonstrate that for both weekly as well as monthly return series the Student-t distribution is superior to the standard normal distribution. In particular, the estimated GARCH-t models appear to be reasonably successful in accounting for both observed leptokurtosis and conditional heteroskedasticity from German stock return movements.     

Market microstructure and security pricing in the warsaw market

The speed with which information is impounded in security prices is evaluated with respect to several market microstructure variables in the context of a dynamic, rapidly-changing market, the Warsaw Stock Exchange. The dynamic nature of this market allows for predictions concerning pricing efficiency in more mature markets as they merge or expand their number of offerings. The results indicate that the performance of the Warsaw Exchange compares favorably with that of the average security traded on the NASDAQ. To the extent that recent mergers of several exchanges have had the effect of engaging more market participants and enhancing trading opportunities through expanded hours, trading efficiency has been positively affected. There is also weaker support for the view that consolidating securities on fewer exchanges will improve informational efficiency as well.     

Product diffusion and pricing with market frictions

Summary. We study pricing and product diffusion in a dynamic general equilibrium framework with product market frictions. Ongoing R&D activity leads, with an endogenously determined probability, to continual improvements in product quality. We characterize the steady-state equilibrium with endogenous product diffusion in which a number of different goods co-exist on the quality ladder. We show that the severity of the economy's market frictions is a crucial determinant of the pricing structure, the product diffusion pattern, the level of R&D investment, the rate of endogenous growth, the length of Schumpeterian product cycles and the possibility of multiple growth paths. Eliminating market frictions leads to a degenerate product ladder of precisely one step, containing only the most recent product, as in the monopolistic competition literature. Received: August 16, 1999; revised version: March 6, 2001     

赞比亚电力市场概览

现状1.机构设置成立于1970年的赞比亚国家电力公司(ZESCO)属国有企业,是赞比亚电力市场最大的运营商,负责除铜带省外赞比亚全国的发电、输电和供电。截止到2003年3月31日的2002财政年度,赞比亚国家电力公司的营业额为5436亿克瓦查(约合1.14亿美元),利润400亿克瓦查(约合840万美     

Asymmetric access pricing in the Internet backbone market

For an arbitrary number of networks, I study the impact of asymmetric interconnection charges on competition for consumers and websites in the Internet backbone market. I show that the configuration of interconnection charges has important implications for the market structure.     

电力行业价值链核心流程与电力市场模式研究

为统一研究各个国家多种多样的电力市场模式的形成动机与运行行为的一致性与差异性，文章从电力行业价值链核心流程分析着手，归纳出电力市场的理论上的理想管理模式，为研究国际电力市场的发展趋势与我国未来的电力市场管理模式设计提供理论准备。     

Asset pricing and downside risk in the Australian share market

As downside risk has been identified as a separate risk exposure to investors, we investigate whether downside beta and co-skewness exposure impact on the return to investors in Australian equities. Although considered as a developed market, the Australian Securities Exchange merits separate investigation, as it is small and concentrated on some sectors, when compared with the major developed markets. As realized returns are a proxy for expected returns, we separately examine conditional returns in upturn and downturn periods. We find that both downside risks are separately priced by investors, and that our results are unaffected by the inclusion of a range of company characteristics. We subsequently confirm that returns to each downside risk are not related. In robustness tests, we conclude that the return to downside risk cannot be explained by a size, a value, or a momentum premium. Although it also has explanatory power, the inclusion of a leverage factor also does not reduce the explanatory power of downside risk.     

Weight discrimination in the German labour market

We explore the effects of higher body mass index (BMI) or obesity on different labour market outcomes. We extend the present literature by investigating the effect of obesity on (i) promotion likelihood and (ii) unemployment duration, in addition to the effect on (iii) wages and (iv) probability of being employed. We find an obesity penalty on wages, employment likelihood, promotion likelihood and unemployment duration among females in Germany taking into account of endogeneity of BMI and sample selection. We are also able to identify an unexplained effect of obesity on wages, employment and promotion likelihood for females using decomposition techniques that can be attributed to weight discrimination.     

Co-learning patterns as emergent market phenomena: An electricity market illustration

The definition of emergence remains problematic, particularly for systems with purposeful human interactions. This study explores the practical import of this concept within a specific market context: namely, a double-auction market for wholesale electric power that operates over a transmission grid with spatially located buyers and sellers. Each profit-seeking seller is a learning agent that attempts to adjust its daily supply offers to its best advantage. The sellers are co-learners in the sense that their supply offer adjustments are in response to past market outcomes that reflect the past supply offer choices of all sellers. Attention is focused on the emergence of co-learning patterns, that is, global market patterns that arise and persist over time as a result of seller co-learning. Examples of co-learning patterns include correlated seller supply offer behaviors and correlated seller net earnings outcomes. Heat maps are used to display and interpret co-learning pattern findings. One key finding is that co-learning strongly matters in this auction market environment. Sellers that behave as Gode-Sunder budget-constrained zero-intelligence agents, randomly selecting their supply offers subject only to a break-even constraint, tend to realize substantially lower net earnings than sellers that tacitly co-learn to correlate their supply offers for market power advantages.     

Towards a complete real-time electricity market design

The general design for the real-time electricity market presented in this paper optimizes and prices both real and reactive power simultaneously in an AC setting, where all assets—generation, load and transmission—are allowed to bid and are financially settled at the locational price times energy consumed or produced. The result is that transmission lines are compensated for both capacity and admittance, providing incentives for efficient operation of transmission-related assets such as FACTS devices, if price-taking behavior is assumed. Losses are incorporated into the design and become an operating cost for transmission. The market design is shown to be revenue neutral and, under some assumptions, nonconfiscatory.      

Measuring market power and the efficiency of Alberta's restructured electricity market: An energy‐only market design

We measure the degree of market power execution and inefficiencies in Alberta's restructured electricity market. Using hourly wholesale market data from 2008 to 2014, we find that firms exercise substantial market power in the highest demand hours with limited excess production capacity. The degree of market power execution in all other hours is low. Market inefficiencies are larger in the high demand hours and elevate production costs by 6.7%–19% above the competitive benchmark, with an average of 13%. This reflects 2.1% of the average market price across all hours. A recent regulatory policy clarifies that certain types of unilateral market power execution is permitted in Alberta. We find evidence that suggests that strategic behaviour changed after this announcement. Market power execution increased. We illustrate that the observed earnings are often sufficient to promote investment in natural gas based technologies. The rents from market power execution can exceed the estimated capacity costs for certain generation technologies. However, we demonstrate that the energy market profits in the presence of no market power execution are generally insufficient to promote investment in new generation capacity. This stresses the importance of considering both short‐run and long‐run electricity market performance measures.