Emission trading has become recently more and more import in environmental regulation. In the context of controlling greenhouse gas emissions, the directive on a Europewide trading scheme for large immobile sources may be perceived as one of the most important milestones in recent years. Prior...

The question of third-party access to the networks has become central to the debate around the liberalisation of the European electricity markets due to the natural monopoly characteristic of the transmission network. The European Union?s electricity directive provides three institutional...

This paper explores the relation between the regulation of monopolistic upstream prices and the incentives of a vertically integrated input monopolist to discriminate third parties on the downstream market. Currently, this is an issue in network industries like telecommunications, electricity...

In German electricity submarkets for residential customers standard contracts offered by former monopolists are the more costly option for customers who have not switched to an alternative contract yet. As most German households are served with this contract type we follow the Limit Pricing...

Most balaning markets of electric power are organized as uniform-price auctions. In 2001, the balancing market of England and Wales switched to a pay-as-bid auction with the intention of reducing wholesale electricity prices. Numerical simultations of an electricity auction model have indicated...

In this paper we present a new approach to evaluate the environmental efficiency of decision making units. We propose a model that describes a two-stage process consisting of a production and an end-of-pipe abatement stage with the environmental efficiency being determined by the efficiency of...

A fully unbundled, regulated network firm of unknown efficiency level can untertake unobservable effort to increase the likelihood of low downstream prices, e.g. by facilitating downstream competition. To incentivize such effort, the regulator can use an incentive scheme paying transfers to the...

A Bayesian supply function equilibrium is characterized in a market where firms have private information about their uncertain costs. It is found that with supply function competition, and in contrast to Bayesian Cournot competition, competitiveness is affected by the parameters of the...

Ramsey-Boiteux prices and monopoly prices are frequently regarded as being similar. This might suggest that, in particular in network in- dustries with large fixed costs, sometimes monopoly pricing is close to the Ramsey-Boiteux second best and welfare superior to imperfectly regulated prices....

Scarce interconnector capacities are a severe obstacle to transregional competition and a unified market for electricity in the European Union. However, physically the interconnectors are rarely used up to capacity. This is due to the fact that the current allocation schemes make only limited...