In November 2011 Sweden abolished the uniform national electricity price and introduced separate price zones. This was the result of an antitrust settlement between the Commission and the Swedish network operator, which was accused of discriminating between domestic and export electricity...

The Russian Federation is in the process of making major structural changes to its railway and electricity sectors. Both sectors will be at least partly vertically disintegrated, with the aim of creating competition in the "upstream" sector while maintaining state ownership and control of the...

The purpose of this research is to evaluate the impact of vertical unbundling on German electric utilities. Our research mainly relies on in-depth interviews with sector-experts from the German utilities. We will discuss both short-term changes and the long-term impact on competition in the...

What is a good balance between competition and coordination in network industries? Network unbundling aims to promote competition, but this has to be balanced against the downside of unbundling: firm-internal coordination falls away and must be replaced by external market mechanisms. This is a...

This publication (of 261 pages) represents the proceedings of a roundtable on the application of competition law and policy to the electricity sector that was held at the OECD in October 1996. The proceedings include submissions from 18 OECD countries outlining the regulatory regime for...

Hybrid governance structures between markets and hierarchies in many industries, e.g., in energy and telecommunications, challenge antitrust and regulation policy. The paper focuses on the theoretical and methodological basis provided by the New Institutional Economics (NIE) for analyzing the...

This paper is a law and economics analysis about the effects of the recent decision to exempt Mexico's energy regulator from a regulatory impact analysis. This occured in spite of receiving an opinion from the competition authority about competition effects of changing the rules of the game for...

By integrating a communications system with the existing power grid, smart grids provide end-to-end connectivity. This enables all entities and components integrated in the electricity supply system to exchange information without knowing the network's structure. New services and applications...

In electricity day-ahead markets organized as uniform price auction, a small reduction in supply in times of high demand can cause substantial increases in price. We use a unique data set of failures of generation capacity in the German-Austrian electricity market to investigate the relationship...