Reliability Differentiation of Electricity Transmission

In many jurisdictions, electric utility restructuring has included the creation of an independent system operator (ISO) to dispatch generation, establish the market-clearing price, and allocate limited transmission capacity among users. This paper differentiates reliability through rate unbundling. We propose a capacity reservation tariff (CRT) to induce the users to self-select their preferred levels of reliability. Based on these self-selected reliability levels, the ISO can efficiently allocate limited transmission capacity. Our proposed CRT can be a practical solution to the transmission congestion problem faced by the California ISO in the implementation of retail access.     

Decision-making in the two-act antitrust decision problem

This paper focuses on the antitrust decision-making process as it pertains to anti-merger policy as a special case of the more general two-act decision problem. We employ the Analytic Hierarchy Process to analyze some prominent antitrust merger decision. The analysis suggests that the courts have failed to give potential competition its due when it acts to dampen any alleged market power accruing to the market leader, which in turn suggests that the defendants would be well advised to reorient the weight that they give to potential competition in designing their defense.     

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