Priority pricing of interruptible electric service induces each customer to self select a rationing priority that matches the rank order of its interruption loss. This paper extends the theory by considering the possibility of early notification, an option offered by many electric utilities. The...

We provide an efficiency justification for the imposition of the uniform pricing constraint in universal service obligations (USO), where USO are defined as a set of constraints imposed on firms belonging to a network industry. In addition to the uniform pricing (UP) constraint, which is an...

A public-choice model is presented in order to explain the fact that publicly owned electricity utilities rarely price at marginal cost in practice. It is shown that if (1) government revenues are raised through proportional taxes, (2) median income is less than mean income, and (3) the share of...