The virtual utility (VU) is a flexible collaboration of independent, market-driven entities that provide efficient energy service demanded by consumers without necessarily owning the corresponding assets. The VU becomes a metaphor for lean, flexible electricity production/delivery and flexible,...

Traditional capital budgeting theory (as an extension of financial economics) is characterized as Panglossian because ofits suggestion that rational market outcomes produce the best of all possible worlds. During the last two decades, practice-oriented theorists have increasingly been moving...