This volume explores how Texas's groundbreaking program of electricity restructuring has become a model for truly competitive energy markets in the United States.

The platform economy reflects the business model of some of the largest and fastest-growing firms in the economy. Platform business models emerge and thrive because of the potential profit in taking advantage of transactions cost reductions to connect people for mutual benefit, and this value...

Hayek's (1945) elaboration of the difficulty of aggregating diffuse private knowledge is the best-known articulation of the knowledge problem, and is an example of the difficulty of coordinating individual plans and choices in the ubiquitous and unavoidable presence of dispersed, private,...

We illustrate the properties of a competitive joint venture (CJV) institution as an alternative to traditional natural monopoly regulation of the distribution wires portion of the electricity supply chain. This CJV institution consists of an endogeneous ownership rule and a wires access charge...

In this paper prepared for the Miller Upton Forum on the Wealth and Well-Being of Nations, Kiesling asks why in this digital age the basic technology supporting the production and distribution of electric power has changed so little since the industry’s birth in the early twentieth century....

The plague visited unprecedented mortality on Europe for centuries, shifting the relative values of production inputs. It also changed the costs and benefits of defining and enforcing property rights. We develop a new property rights model to explain the decline in value of non-human factors of...