Multidimensional auctions are a natural, practical solution when governments pursue more than one objective in their public-private-partnership transactions. However, multi-criteria auctions seem difficult to implement and vulnerable to corruption and opportunistic behavior of both parties...

Over their two years of existence since deregulation began, the electricity markets operated by the California Power Exchange [PX] and Independent System Operator [ISO] have often seen wide price fluctuations and numerous episodes of prices clearly above marginal costs of generation. Both...