Theory and empirics suggest that by curbing competition, incumbent electricity companies which used to be and here are referred to as Vertically Integrated Utilities (VIUs), can increase their profitability through combined ownership of generation and transmission and/or distribution networks....

In the EU electricity industry, many Vertically Integrated Utilities (VIUs) have ownership both of electricity generators and of transmission, hence VIU-owned or allied generators often are bidders in auctions for VIU-owned transmission. In Van Koten (2006) I show that welfare suffers and the...

When a bidder (referred to as the privileged bidder) is residual claimant to a part of the revenue from an auction with two bidders whose valuations are independently and identically distributed, bidding incentives are changed. Specifically, the privileged bidder will bid more aggressively to...

Motivated by the failure of competition to emerge after the natural gas market in the Czech Republic was liberalized, I explore the impact of natural gas storage ownership and upstream competition on the downstream level. I extend standard Cournot models to understand current and likely future...

As part of the Single Market Program the European Commission commanded the liberalization and regulatory harmonization of utilities, transport and telecommunication services. This paper investigates whether and how this process affected the productivity of European network firms. Exploiting the...

Promoting competition among electricity producers is primarily targeted at ensuring low electricity prices for consumers. Producers could, however, withhold part of production facilities (i.e., apply a capacity cutting strategy) and thereby push more expensive production facilities to satisfy...

We try to better understand the comparative advantages of structural and behavioral remedies of deregulation in electricity markets, an eminent policy issue for which the experimental evidence is scant and problematic. Specifically, we investigate theoretically and experimentally the effects on...

Price fluctuations that partially comove with demand are a specific feature inherent to liberalized electricity markets. The regulatory authority in Great Britain, however, believed that sometimes electricity prices were significantly higher than what was expected and, therefore, introduced...

Promoting competition among electricity producers is crucial for ensuring allocative efficiency and lower electricity prices. In this paper, I empirically examine the electricity market of England and Wales in order to analyze to what extent the regulatory reforms were successful in promoting...

Inclusion of an efficiency defense brings about an asymmetric information problem between an antitrust agency and merging firms concerning efficiencies due to mergers. Effort level and merger type determine the probability of producing the evidence that efficiencies satisfy a consumer welfare...