Liberalised retail energy markets present an apparent puzzle: when offered the chance to buy a homogeneous product at a lower price, many consumers appear to leave ‘money on the table'. We observe the decisions made by over 7,000 consumers in a collective switching exercise and find that...

Competition Authorities are introducing new informational remedies to help consumers search and switch more actively. Using a specially commissioned data set, and unique direct estimates of the gains, search and switching time which consumers anticipate, we examine the determinants of consumer...

In this article we chart the development of competition and deregulation of the British retail energy markets, explaining the evolution of competitive constraints when consumers are introduced to supplier choice for the first time. In the context of rising real energy prices for consumers, and...

The introduction of a price cap for consumers who have not switched to cheaper deals in the British energy market reflects increasing political concern about the higher prices paid by these consumers compared with their more active counterparts. In this paper, we demonstrate the variations in...

One objective of introducing incentive regulation to the newly privatized UK utilities over the past 20 years was to encourage efficient pricing structures. Caps have been imposed on average price levels, giving firms freedom to rebalance amongst prices within the basket. We test how firms have...

Liberalisation of the British electricity market, in which previously monopolised regional markets were exposed to large-scale entry, is used to test the propositions of several recent theoretical papers on oligopolistic nonlinear pricing. Consistent with those theories, each oligopolist offered...

Britain was one of the first countries to introduce competition to retail energy markets in 1998; after a decade of choice, around half of its residential consumers have switched supplier. This paper presents evidence on consumer and supplier behaviour over the decade since the markets were opened...

The residential UK electricity market was opened for the first time in 1999, introducing choice of supplier, and about 40 percent of households changed supplier in the first four years. After three years price caps were removed. We review this process and assess the competitiveness of the market...

One objective of introducing incentive regulation to the newly privatized UK utilities over the past 20 years was to encourage efficient pricing structures. Caps have been imposed on average price levels, giving firms freedom to rebalance amongst prices within the basket. We test how firms have...