We analyze a market game where firms choose capacities under uncertainty about future market conditions and make output choices after uncertainty has unraveled. We show existence and uniqueness of equilibrium under imperfect competition and establish that capacity choices by strategic firms are...

Coordinating the timing and location of new production facilities is one of the challenges of liberalized power sectors. It is complicated by the presence of transmission bottlenecks, oligopolistic competition, and the unknown prospects of low-carbon technologies. The authors build a model...

Electricity markets are prone to the abuse of market power. Several US markets employ algorithms to monitor and mitigate market power abuse in real time. The performance of automated mitigation procedures is contingent on precise estimates of firms' marginal production costs. Currently, marginal...

Despite the positive effect electricity grids separated from generation and supply by ownership are expected to have on the level of competition in the non-network activities, several EU member states still adhere to a solely legally unbundled transmission grid. This choice might be induced by...

The internet giants - Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google, among others - have transformed society with both positive and negative effects. The negative effects have been stark. There have been huge disruptions caused by e-commerce. More recently, subtler, but even more serious negative effects...

In a 'smart' electricity distribution network, flexible distribution resources (FDRs) can be coordinated to improve efficiency. But coordination enables whoever controls such resources to exercise market power. The paper establishes the following efficiency rankings of market structures:...

The European Commission is introducing new regulations on submission and publication of data in electricity markets (SPDEM) and on wholesale energy market integrity and transparency (REMIT). I discuss issues relevant for undertaking an evaluation such regulations. I argue that, for market...

The aim of this paper is to give deeper insights into the impact of regulatory reforms and privatization on R&D spending of electricity utilities. Building on a panel data set including the biggest European utilities from eight EU-countries over a period from 1985 until 2010, we find a strong...

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...