The literature on deregulated electricity markets generally assumes available capacities to be given. In contrast, this paper studies a model where firms precommit to capacity levels before competing in a uniform price auction. The analysis sheds light on recent empirical findings that firms use...

It has been argued that having a contract market before the spot market enhances competition (Allaz and Vila, 1993). Taking into account the repeated nature of electricity markets, we check the robustness of the argument that the access to contract markets reduces the market power of generators....