This paper is the first in a symposium of papers that examine the 2009 report by Frank Wolak into the New Zealand electricity market. The Wolak report concluded that there had been a cumulative total of $4.3b (NZD) of overcharging in the New Zealand wholesale market over a period of seven years....

This paper is the second in a symposium of papers that examine the 2009 report by Frank Wolak into the New Zealand electricity market. In this paper, we discuss the Report’s measures of the ability and incentives of generators to exercise unilateral market power. We show that the construction...

Consider a model in which a consumer faces a lottery with j other people for a prize, so that the probability of winning the prize is 1/(j+1). Now let j be a random variable, determined by the binomial distribution. Specifically, let there be n potential competitors for the consumer in the...

This paper is part of a wider research programme using a dynamic-programming approach to modelling the choices about the amount of risk to take by batting and bowling teams in One Day International cricket. An important confounding variable in this analysis is the ground conditions (size of...

This paper derives a general sufficient condition for existence and uniqueness in continuous games using a variant of the contraction mapping theorem applied to mapping from a subset of the real line on to itself. We first prove this contraction mapping variant, and then show how the existence...

In a standard English auction in which bidders’ valuations are independently drawn from a common distribution, a standard regularity condition is that the survivor function of the distribution be log concave. In an auction where the seller sets a fixed price, the equivalent condition requires...

The Fixed Price Offer (FPO) mechanism in Trade Me auctions allows sellers to make a take-it-or-leave-it offer at the conclusion of an unsuccessful auction. We investigate the effects of the FPO option on strategies and outcomes in independent-value auctions. The FPO option induces some bidders...

Consider the class of games in which each player chooses a strategy from a connected subset of the real line. Many oligopoly models fall into this class. In many of these applications, it would be useful to show that an equilibrium was unique, or at least to have a set of conditions under which...

This paper is the second in a symposium of papers that examine the 2009 report by Frank Wolak into the New Zealand electricity market. In this paper, we discuss the Report’s measures of the ability and incentives of generators to exercise unilateral market power. We show that the construction...