role of residential demand response in modern electricity markets abstract electricity generation must match the demand at each instant following seasonal patterns and instantaneous fluctuations thus one of the biggest drivers of costs and capacity requirements is the electricity demand that occurs during peak periods this paper reviews market related problems of modern electric grids and possible solutions to address them in particular one techno economical solution namely residential demand response programs enabled by a smart grid is analyzed and modeled in detail the implications of this solution from both economic and policy perspectives are discussed the analysis results in several insights first a local optimum does not generally lead to a global optimum especially for complex markets second in this approach there exists a disconnection between the locus of the problem electric utilities and the locus of the solution change of demand third any techno economic solution must be carefully designed and global impact should be evaluated to ensure that the final objective is achieved and fourth two way communication is an essential requirement for the successful deployment of smart grids

residential energy demand and the interaction of price and temperature british experimental evidence the responsiveness of heating energy demand to pricing is shown to be dependent on temperature and vice versa this is investigated empirically using residential electricity demand data obtained under conditions of price variation from a british time of use pricing experiment results confirm that consumer responses to higher electricity prices are conditional on temperature levels particularly during the daytime and for households with high overall levels of electricity consumption and previous experience of time of use tariffs

reforming residential electricity tariff in china block tariffs pricing approach the chinese households that make up approximately a quarter of world households are facing a residential power tariff reform in which a rising block tariff structure will be implemented and this tariff mechanism is widely used around the world the basic principle of the structure is to assign a higher price for higher income consumers with low price elasticity of power demand to capture the non linear effects of price and income on elasticities we set up a translog demand model the empirical findings indicate that the higher income consumers are less sensitive than those with lower income to price changes we further put forward three proposals of chinese residential electricity tariffs compared to a flat tariff the reasonable block tariff structure generates more efficient allocation of cross subsidies better incentives for raising the efficiency of electricity usage and reducing emissions from power generation which also supports the living standards of low income households

does marriage really make men more productive this paper presents new descriptive evidence regarding marital pay premiums earned by white males longitudinal data indicate that wages rise after marriage and that cross sectional marriage premiums appear to result from a steepening of the earnings profile data from a company personnelfile that includes information on job grades and supervisor performance ratings reveal large marital status pay differences within a narrow range of occupations managers and professionals and environments a single firm married workers tend to be located in higher paying job grades there are very small pay differentials within grades married men receive higher performance ratings than single men as a result they are much more likely to be promoted controlling for rated performance however eliminates the promotion differential sanders korenman is an assistant professor of economics and public affairs at princeton university and is a faculty associate of the office of population research at princeton university and a research affiliate of the national bureau of economic research nber david neumark is an assistant professor of economics at the university of pennsylvania and a research affiliate of the nber korenman wishes to acknowledge the hewlett foundation and the harvard university center for population studies for financial support the authors are grateful to james medofffor making available an extract from the company personnelfile questions regarding data availability should be directed to professor james

women s schooling home teaching and economic growth the hypothesis that increases in the schooling of women enhance the human capital of the next generation and thus make a unique contribution to economic growth is assessed on the basis of data describing green revolution india estimates are obtained that indicate that a component of the significant and positive relationship between maternal literacy and child schooling in the indian setting reflects the productivity effect of home teaching and that the existence of this effect combined with the increase in returns to schooling for men importantly underlies the expansion of female literary following the onset of the green revolution

effects of family background on earnings and returns to schooling evidence from brazil we investigate whether omitted family background variables are responsible for high returns to schooling estimated in brazil returns to schooling fall by about one third when parental schooling is added to wage equations surprisingly the schooling of fathers in law has larger effects on wages than the schooling of fathers on the basis of a model of assortative mating we interpret this as evidence that parental characteristics represent unobservable worker attributes rather than nepotism in the labor market we conclude that the family background bias in returns to schooling is modest and need not imply returns to family connections

public utility pricing under risk the case of self rationing comment and extension this paper reviews a previously offered model of electricity load management containing uncertainties this analysis allows individual customer demand to fluctuate within a billing period also it allows diversity or imperfect correlation among customer demands the behavioral effects are examined for a fuse that allows utilities and customers to incur costs or ration the loads under excess demand charges the behavioral implication is that the demand price is effective at each instant of the billing period the fuse analogy suggests that demand and energy prices be kept separate and that behavior is best understood as a two stage procedure

bargaining foundations of shapley value1 a transferable utility economy in which each agent holds a resource which can be used in combination with the resources of other agents to generate value according to the characteristic function v is studied using a dynamic model of bargaining the main theorem establishes that the payoffs associated with efficient equilibria converge to the agents shapley values as the time between periods of the dynamic game goes to zero in addition it is demonstrated that an efficient equilibrium exists and is unique when an additivity condition is satisfied to demonstrate the sensitivity of the solution to the institutional detail we modify the model to allow for partnerships and show that the shapley value is no longer achieved

the accumulation of human capital during marriage by males married males have significantly higher wage rates than never married widowed or divorced males even when differences in educational attainment experience race and so on are controlled for evidence presented in this paper suggests that most of the unexplained wage differential associated with marital status in earnings regressions results from males accumulating human capital more rapidly when they are married than when those same males are not married the hypothesis that married males earn more than unmarried males because marriage facilitates the financing of human capital accumulation is supported by this and other evidence

the bias in price elasticity estimates under homothetic separability implications for analysis of peak load electricity pricing this article demonstrates that the assumption of a homothetically separable utility function places a priori restrictions on the parameters of the demand system if these restrictions are unwarranted an open question if they are not explicitly tested they will lead to biased price elasticity estimates in particular we show that the uncompensated own price elasticities must be smaller than the negative of the expenditure shares that is the price elasticity of peak electricity demand must be less than the negative of the share of expenditure devoted to peak electricity this finding is probably not new to economists familiar with consumer demand analysis nevertheless many recent studies of consumer demand for electricity under time of day rates explicitly impose this restriction the resulting price elasticity estimates are usually quite large in absolute value 5 to 8 but they are the product of restrictive a priori assumptions as well as information embodied in the sample data the results of

measuring efficiencies and returns to scale of nippon telegraph telephone in production and cost analyses this article provides a theoretical framework related to data envelopment analysis dea in which an analytical relationship among eight different efficiency concepts is defined and explored in terms of production and cost analyses this article extends the theoretical basis into the measurement of scale economies se and returns to scale rts a unique feature of the se rts measurement is that the proposed approach is based upon the measurement regarding not only production activity but also cost performance as an important case study this article applies the dea based approach to measure the eight efficiency concepts and se rts of nippon telegraph telephone ntt this study finds that ntt has maintained high se and increasing rts in the operations of 39 annual periods from 1953 through 1992

benefits of women s education within marriage results for israel in a dual labor market context in the quarter century following gary becker s now classic presentation of the human capital model in terms of formal schooling and training on the job the approach has been extended with telling effect into numerous additional fields of application a tribute to the fecundity of the original formulation one development of some particular interest has been the focus on decision making within the household unit rather than on the individual an approach that has opened a new field of research in the economics of marriage and the family indeed adopting the wider focus of the household rather than the individual decision maker lee benham has shown that for the united states at least wife s education has a positive effect on husband s earnings capacity 2 putting aside for the moment alternative explanations in terms of mate sorting 3 benham s finding suggests that a person s own labor market productivity po is a function f not only of his own human capital attainments ho but also of those of this spouse h formally po f ho hs where 8po 0hs 0 thus the effective human capital stock of a married person is a positive function of the human capital of each marriage partner benham sees these positive cross productivity effects of education within marriage as a particularly focused form of the transfer of the benefits of education by particularly nonmarket association 4 he argues that these benefits may arise in at least three ways 1 by extending information and advice thereby providing a close substitute for a person s own formal education 2 by helping the person acquire specific skills and 3 by helping the person acquire general skills related to information acquisition and assimilation and coping with change 5 marriage of course offers both partners greater opportunities for sharing in the pecuniary benefits of

does increasing women s schooling raise the schooling of the next generation the positive cross sectional relationship between the schooling of mothers and their children is substantially biased upward due to correlations between schooling and heritable ability as well as assortative mating an increase in the schooling of women would not have beneficial effects in terms of the schooling of children increased maternal schooling leads to reduced home time for mothers anticipating the consequences of investing in women s schooling requires attention to the role that schooling plays in the marriage market as well as to opportunities in the labor market for women

tariff structure of japanese electric power companies an empirical analysis using dea this research explores a marginal cost mc based pricing system using data envelopment analysis dea this dea technique is widely applied for performance analysis and efficiency measurement in public and private sectors this article does not follow such a previous research direction rather directing itself towards the new measurement of mc and ramsey prices of multiple electric power services as an important case study this research applies the proposed dea approach to examine how much the current tariffs of japanese electric power services deviate from these mc and ramsey prices this type of research has never been explored in japan even though such a research effort is needed by many policy makers and consumers it is hoped that our empirical findings can serve as a policy making basis for guiding the japanese electric power industry this study believes that this japanese experience is useful for other nations such as asia pacific countries where many public industries are regulated by their governments

a literature study for dea applied to energy and environment abstract this study systematically summarizes previous research efforts on data envelopment analysis dea applied to energy and environment in the past four decades including concepts and methodologies on dea environmental assessment industrial developments are very important for all nations in terms of their economic prosperities a problem is that the development produces various pollutions on air water and other types of contaminations all of which are usually associated with our health problems and climate changes thus it is necessary for us to consider how to make a balance between economic success and pollution mitigation to maintain a high level of social sustainability in the world it is widely considered that dea is one of the methodologies to examine the level of sustainability this study examines a recent research trend on dea applications from 1980s to 2010s nowadays many researchers have paid serious attention on how to combat various difficulties in the areas of energy and environment as a result the number of articles on dea applications on energy and environment has dramatically increased particularly after 2000s however it is true that dea has strengths and drawbacks in the applications therefore it is very important for us to carefully use dea for guiding large policy issues and business strategies such as the global warming and climate change an underlying premise of this study is that technology innovation in engineering and natural science may solve various problems by linking it with political and managerial efforts the use of dea provides a methodological linkage among them so enhancing the practicality in mitigating problems due to climate change and environmental pollutions this literature study along with a summary on conceptual and methodological developments provides us with guidelines for our future research works on dea on energy and environment issues

time of day electricity consumption response to temperature and the ownership of air conditioning appliances this article is concerned with the endogeneity of air conditioning appliance ownership in the consumption of electricity by time of day tod both tod consumption and air conditioning appliance ownership depend on temperature level and on household responsiveness to temperature variation as well as on other measured household characteristics the article presents an appropriate econometric methodology and applies it to obtain estimates and perform tests based on data from southern california edison s residential tod pricing experiment the authors emphasize the implications for estimated consumption price elasticities

commercial industrial customer response to time of use electricity prices some experimental results this article analyzes a time of use pricing experiment involving over 700 small and medium size commercial industrial firms two basic rate structures were implemented one with time varying demand kw charges and a flat energy kwh charge and the other with time varying energy charges and a flat kw charge a small but statistically significant elasticity of substitution between peak and offpeak kwh consumption is estimated for the summer season in the overall sample for firms facing the time of use demand rate a substantially larger response is estimated in the summer season for the subgroup of large firms in the experiment that faced a time of use demand rate and this response translates into a welfare gain that in just the first year more than offsets the additional metering costs involved under mandatory implementation

schooling search and spouse selection testing economic theories of marriage and household behavior the implications of the economic theories of marriage and of household fertility behavior are tested in a framework in which educational investment marital search and marital matches are responsive to marriage market conditions and the personal traits of individual agents some of which are unobserved by the econometrician implications are also derived and tested for the effects of longevity attractiveness preferences and labor and marriage market conditions on schooling marriage age and spouse choice the empirical results indicate that inattention to heterogeneity and martial selection leads to a false rejection of the economic theory of marriage but to a false acceptance of the value of time fertility hypothesis

bidding for the surplus a non cooperative approach to the shapley value abstract we propose a simple mechanism to determine how the surplus generated by cooperation is to be shared in zero monotonic environments with transferable utility the mechanism consists of a bidding stage followed by a proposal stage we show that the subgame perfect equilibrium outcomes of this mechanism coincide with the vector of the shapley value payoffs we extend our results to implement the weighted shapley values finally we generalize our mechanism to handle arbitrary transferable utility environments the modified mechanism generates an efficient coalition structure and implements the shapley values of the super additive cover of the environment journal of economic literature classification numbers c71 c72

optimal pricing of the portuguese telephone service a first attempt is made at finding the optimal two part tariff for portugese telephone service a theoretical model of consumer demand is presented and the two part tariff which maximizes social welfare is derived the model is then calibrated using portugese data and previous econometric studies the optimal long run two part tariff consists of an access charge that is close to twice the marginal cost of access and a usage charge 25 above the marginal cost of use the level of the optimal two part tariff depends mainly on the marginal cost of taxation and on an index of aversion to inequality the structure of the optimal two part tariff depends mainly on the ratio between the marginal consumer s usage level and the average usage level although the cost estimates are very tentative the results suggest that the 1986 usage charge was greater than optimum no similar conclusion can be drawn with respect to the acces charge

learning by doing and learning from others human capital and technical change in agriculture household level panel data from a nationally representative sample of rural indian households describing the adoption and profitability of high yielding seed varieties hyvs associated with the green revolution are used to test the implications of a model incorporating learning by doing and learning spillovers the estimates indicate that i imperfect knowledge about the management of the new seeds was a significant barrier to adoption ii this barrier diminished as farmer experience with the new technologies increased iii own experience and neighbors experience with hyvs significantly increased hyv profitability and iv farmers do not fully incorporate the village returns to learning in making adoption decisions

dea duality on returns to scale rts in production and cost analyses an occurrence of multiple solutions and differences between production based and cost based rts estimates this article discusses the concept of rts returns to scale in the framework of dea data envelopment analysis production and cost analyses focusing on an occurrence of multiple solutions and how to deal with such a difficulty dual relationships between production based and cost based rts estimates are also theoretically discussed in this study

estimating the economic return to educational levels using data on twins this paper relaxes some restrictions of previous twin based estimates of the effects of education on earnings first it estimates the earnings premiums associated with different educational levels second it estimates a piecewise linear relationship between the natural logarithm of annual earnings and years of schooling third the measurement error corrections are based on a less restrictive non classical measurement error model the estimation strategy implies that ability bias can be investigated separately in different parts of the educational distribution the linear relationship between the logarithm of annual earnings and years of schooling is rejected furthermore the results in the sample of identical mz twins indicated both that the ability bias could be of different signs and of different magnitudes in different parts of the educational distribution the twin based estimates in the sample of fraternal dz twins did not display any marked differences as compared to the cross sectional estimates finally the results indicated that the error corrected twin based estimates of the average return to years of schooling that rely on a classical measurement error model are upwards biased by approximately 30 copyright 2004 john wiley sons ltd

why does spousal education matter for earnings assortative mating and cross productivity spousal education is correlated with earnings for two reasons cross productivity between couples and assortative mating this article empirically disentangles the two effects by using chinese twins data we have two innovations using twins data to control for the unobserved mating effect in our estimations and estimating both current and wedding time earnings equations we find that both crossproductivity and mating are important in explaining the current earnings although the mating effect exists for both husbands and wives the cross productivity effect mainly runs from chinese husbands to wives our findings shed light on the theories of human capital marriage and the family

divestiture of nippon telegraph and telephone this article discusses whether the japanese government should break up ntt nippon telegraph telephone in 1995 as the u s federal government compelled at t american telephone telegram to break itself into toll and local telephone companies in 1984 the divestiture of ntt has long been a major industrial policy issue in japan since the common carrier was privatized in 1985 the governmental decision to divest it may influence not only the japanese telecommunications infrastructure but also the global telecommunications and information industries in the world where many common carriers are now facing an environmental change from regulation to competition a unique feature of this study is that it employs eight different estimation techniques to obtain a cost function of ntt so that this research avoids a methodological bias occurring in many empirical studies this study confirms that ntt has maintained cost subadditivity but it has failed to establish the status of a natural monopoly in the observed time period however it also finds that the ntt divestiture will not produce a price reducing benefit to japanese telecommunications consumers this research result will serve as empirical evidence for guiding the governmental review of this large scale industrial policy issue in japan

regulatory reforms and productivity an empirical analysis of the japanese electricity industry the japanese electricity industry has experienced regulatory reforms since the mid 1990s this article measures productivity in japan s steam power generation sector and examines the effect of reforms on the productivity of this industry over the period 1978 2003 we estimate the luenberger productivity indicator which is a generalization of the commonly used malmquist productivity index using a data envelopment analysis approach factors associated with productivity change are investigated through dynamic generalized method of moments gmm estimation of panel data our empirical analysis shows that the regulatory reforms have contributed to productivity growth in the steam power generation sector in japan

estimates of the economic returns to schooling from a new sample of twins this paper uses a new survey to contrast the wages of genetically identical twins with different schooling levels multiple measurements of schooling levels were also collected to assess the effect of reporting error on the estimated economic returns to schooling the data indicate that omitted ability variables do not bias the estimated return to schooling upward but that measurement error does bias it downward adjustment for measurement error indicates that an additional year of schooling increases wages by 12 to 16 percent a higher estimate of the economic returns to schooling than has been previously found copyright 1994 by american economic association

income schooling and ability evidence from a new sample of identical twins we develop a model of optimal schooling investments and estimate it using new data on approximately 700 identical twins we estimate an average return to schooling of 9 percent for identical twins but estimated returns appear to be slightly higher for less able individuals simple cross section estimates are marginally upward biased these empirical results imply that abler individuals attain more schooling because they face lower marginal costs of schooling not because of higher marginal benefits

privatization of nippon telegraph and telephone was it a good policy decision nippon telegraph and telephone ntt corporation was privatized in 1985 under the economic assertion that a public enterprise is less efficient and less profitable than a private enterprise this assertion is referred to as the property right theory in economics and it is used as a theoretical rationale for privatizing publicly owned organizations this article empirically examines the economic assertion by comparing ntt s performance before and after its privatization data envelopment analysis dea is used as the research tool in this study which confirmed the economic assertion in terms of production based efficiency measures but it cannot find any major difference in its cost reducing corporate efforts thus this study presents serious management problems occurring within the ntt s partial privatization the partial privatization is now prevailing in the telecommunications industry all over the world this article also discusses the japanese business environment which makes ntt managerially ineffective under its public private joint ownership

the fall in men s return to marriage declining productivity effects or changing selection historically one of the most robust findings from human capital wage equations has been that married men earn more than men who never marry however the earnings premium paid to u s married compared with never married men declined by more than 40 percent during the 1980s data from the national longitudinal surveys young men and youth cohorts are used to explore two competing explanations for this decline changes in the selection of high wage men into marriage and changes in the productivity effects of marriage due to declining specialization within households the results suggest that the drop in the marriage wage premium was due largely to a decline in the productivity effects associated with marriage instrumental variables estimation suggests that these declining productivity effects can be explained by a reduction in the average degree of specialization across households coupled with an increase in the wage penalty associated with wives labor market hours excerpt

the conservation and welfare effects of information in a time of day pricing experiment a recurring concern in tod pricing studies has been that short term experimental tod rates may not stimulate as much conservation as would occur if tod rates were implemented on a permanent basis that is how accurately do experimental tod pricing results extend to nonexperimental settings the present paper provides information relevant to this adjustment question we examine a little analyzed component of the tod pricing experiment conducted by the southern california edison sce company wherein a subset of the tod treatment households had a continuous display electricity use monitoring device installed mid way through the experiment the sce experiment was one of 14 tod pricing studies initiated by the u s department of energy doe most analyses of tod pricing have been based on doe initiated studies but this experiment was the only such study to include the monitoring component this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

public pricing under imperfect competition abstract existing literature on second best pricing assumes that regulatory control encompasses all industries subject to distortion this paper extends the theory in a game theoretic framework to incorporate market power outside the regulated sector we find that in this situation price always exceeds marginal cost in the public firm and that the profit constraint for the public firm need not be binding in addition the existence of pricing distortions outside the regulated sector can actually increase welfare

a composite cost function for multiproduct firms with an application to economies of scope in banking the composite cost function the authors propose combines a quadratic output structure with a log quadratic input price structure and is well suited for examining economies of scope subadditivity and other important properties of multiproduct firms to compare the composite model with an appropriate set of alternative functional forms they develop a parsimonious but general specification that nests the standard translog cost function the generalized translog cost function a separable quadratic cost function and the composite cost function an application to economies of scope in banking confirms the advantages of the composite model copyright 1992 by mit press

interactions in swiss households energy demand a holistic approach abstract this article analyzes the interactions and possible trade offs between direct energy consumption and embodied energy requirement of households in switzerland in order to assess the net impacts of standard energy policies focusing exclusively on direct energy use direct and embodied energy demand of swiss households are estimated by combining consumption data of a national expenditure survey with data on energy intensity from life cycle analysis using a system of equations and an instrumental variable approach we find that both domains are driven by same determinants but that there is no evidence for significant substitution between them we also find an increasing effect of income on both domains with particularly important effects on embodied energy from a policy perspective our findings highlight a concern that economic growth could bring about an increasing global energy demand through energy requirement for non energy commodities however the wide spread policies targeting direct energy are unlikely to cause a substantial shift in household consumption to embodied energy

the long run effects of a time of use demand charge modifications in demand due to time of use tou pricing have potential to improve the efficiency of electric power supply with long lead times for plant construction utility planners need long run estimates of response to tou rates existing evidence is primarily drawn from short run tou experiments we provide estimates of long run response to a nonexperimental residential tou rate offered by duke power the rate contains a demand charge applied to the maximum rate of energy consumption during the peak period we find that customer response increases over time in a manner that enhances the ability of tou rates to reduce system peak

short and long run time of use price elasticities in swiss residential electricity demand abstract this paper presents an empirical analysis on the residential demand for electricity by time of day this analysis has been performed using aggregate data at the city level for 22 swiss cities for the period 2000 2006 for this purpose we estimated two log log demand equations for peak and off peak electricity consumption using static and dynamic partial adjustment approaches these demand functions were estimated using several econometric approaches for panel data for example lsdv and re for static models and lsdv and corrected lsdv estimators for dynamic models the attempt of this empirical analysis has been to highlight some of the characteristics of the swiss residential electricity demand the estimated short run own price elasticities are lower than 1 whereas in the long run these values are higher than 1 the estimated short run and long run cross price elasticities are positive this result shows that peak and off peak electricity are substitutes in this context time differentiated prices should provide an economic incentive to customers so that they can modify consumption patterns by reducing peak demand and shifting electricity consumption from peak to off peak periods

stochastic frontier production analysis measuring performance of public telecommunications in 24 oecd countries abstract this study presents a new use of least absolute value lav estimation for obtaining parameter estimates of a stochastic frontier production function the lav estimation is combined with data envelopment analysis dea and the resulting dea lav estimates are examined by several statistical tests as an important application this study applies dea lav stochastic frontier production analysis for measuring and predicting the performance of public telecommunications in 24 oecd organization for economic cooperation and development countries this international comparison may serve as an empirical basis for understanding the telecommunications industries whose environments are now shifting from regulation to competition

time of use electricity pricing evidence from a british experiment seemingly unrelated regression sure analysis is applied to data from a british time of use tou pricing experiment it is shown that consumption changes are statistically significant and important but vary by consumption strata the results have implications for demand system analysis of tou data

a dynamic generalization of becker s assortative matching result abstract this paper considers a dynamic matching model in which each agent s future productivity depends in part on their current match as in labor markets schooling intergenerational marriage markets and other environments the planner s endogenous rankings of human distributions are characterized these planner rankings are then used to develop sufficient conditions for positive assortative matching to be dynamically efficient one lesson that emerges is that complementarity assumptions alone are insufficient for a robust sorting theory the curvature of the static production function is also critical to determine optimal sorting patterns in addition the planner s ranking of distributions over human capital yield characterizations of individual attitudes toward human capital gambles in an associated market equilibrium finally the implied dynamics for 1 individual wages and 2 wage distributions across age cohorts are characterized

endowments and the allocation of schooling in the family and in the marriage market the twins experiment 03 we show how comparisons between the within twin correlations of human capital outcomes across identical and nonidentical twins can be used to identify the variability in the individual specific component of endowments and the responsiveness of schooling to individual specific endowments in the family and in the marriage market even when schooling is measured with error estimates from two twins samples indicate that 27 42 percent of the variance in log earnings obesity is due to variability in individual specific endowments allocations of schooling reinforce specific endowments and individual specific earnings endowments of men and their wives schooling are negatively associated

optimal pricing of local telephone service although payment for nearly all other goods and services including toll long distance telephone calls increases with greater consumption nearly 90 percent of the residential telephone subscribers and more than half the business subscribers in the united states now pay a flat monthly rate for local calls see larry garfinkel recently however the telephone companies and regulatory commissions have been moving cautiously toward imposing usage charges for local telephone calls there is renewed interest in what is currently termed usage sensitive pricing t usp it is due to the combined forces of inflation increased local usage and competition from independent firms that sell telephone terminal equipment and supply private toll lines to business customers under usp the pricing of such services as telephone installation directory assistance and minutes of calling is based on incremental rather than average costs since world war ii technological advances have benefited long distance far more than local telephone calling development in microwave communications coaxial cable satellites and waveguides have dramatically lowered the costs of long distance transmission in contrast the costs of local service have moved upward since the late 1960 s at a rate not far below the general price index see at t 1975 faced with a continuing stream of requests for local telephone rate increases state regulatory commissions are finding the concept of tying prices to usage increasingly attractive at t and some of the independent telephone carriers are beginning to test usp plans in several cities with flat rate tariffs increases in local calling add to carrier costs but not to their revenues the local calling rate per subscriber has increased by an average of 2 percent for the past seven years at t s chairman has stated we are moving more and more in the direction of usage sensitive pricing see washington star news p a12 and according to newspaper accounts of at t management documents the bell system plans to phase out flat rate telephone service and begin charging for each local call in major metropolitan areas in 1978 80 see seattle postintelligencer pp 1 10 still regulatory commissions consumer groups and the carriers themselves remain cautious about requiring usage sensitive tariffs for all subscribers the prospective gains from prices more closely related to costs are at least partially offset by the added costs of metering equipment and billing most telephone subscribers prefer flat rates according to bell system marketing surveys see garfinkel p 28 and it is by no means clear which groups of subscribers will be helped and which harmed by such revisions in local tariff structures will the poor end up paying more because they use their phones more should different prices be charged for calls at different times of day on what bases should the monthly and per call rates be determined the purpose of this paper is to sort out some of the questions of economic efficiency and equity that arise when changes are considered in the methods of pricing local telephone services in section i i construct a department of economics the rand corporation and the international institute of management berlin this study was supported under a grant from the john and mary r markle foundation i am indebted to walter s baer for numerous contributions to this paper to s c littlechild and patricia munch and to the managing editor and a referee of this review for critical and constructive review of a draft i have benefited as well from the comments and suggestions of james h alleman stanley m besen william s comanor john m drew leland l johnson john a kay edward d lowry carl pavarini john rolph ralph turvey and chris witze bryant mori assisted with the computer programming see my 1976 paper for a more extensive version of this paper which also discusses optimal flat rate and optimal peak load tariffs

tariffs and load management a post privatisation study of the uk electricity supply industry an electric utility can influence its customers load by providing financial incentives through the prices charged for electricity at different times of use by designing discriminatory time of use tariffs in which the price of electricity corresponds to the marginal cost of supply a utility provides appropriate signals to the customer to increase consumption of electricity at off peak periods the utilization of off peak electricity results in the improvement of power system load factor which is an indicator for the utilities to decide to defer investment in new generating and transmission capacity the need to utilize off peak electricity provides ample justification for the investigation of the determinants of the off peak demand functions customers response to discriminatory prices and their implication to system load management using the econometric approach this paper reports a study of the british experience in the field of tariffs and load management in the case of the privatised electricity supply industry the results of this study may be applicable to the regional electricity companies in the uk the utilities in several developing countries may find this study relevant if they decide to restructure their industry for increasing efficiency and tariff for implementing load management instead of arbitrary load shedding

consumer responses to time varying prices for electricity abstract we report new experimental evidence of the household response to weekday differentials in peak and off peak electricity prices the data come from auckland new zealand where peak residential electricity consumption occurs in winter for heating peak off peak price differentials ranged over four randomly selected groups from 1 0 to 3 5 on average there was no response except in winter in winter participant households reduced electricity consumption by at least 10 took advantage of lower off peak prices but did not respond to the peak price differentials response varied with house and household size time spent away from home and whether water was heated with electricity

the response of small and medium size business customers to time of use tou electricity rates in israel this paper reports on the methodology data and results of the israeli time of use tou electricity pricing experiment in the industrial commercial sector we concentrate on the estimation of the demand functions for electricity under tou and the net welfare gains which result from applying tou rates to small and medium size business customers in israel this experiment which was preceded by a 15 month load research study to allow an optimal sample design was concluded in june 1992 the analysis yielded four major conclusions 1 the estimated gains of small and medium size customers in israel from tou rates are sufficient to justify investment in tou metering technology 2 there have been small but noticeable shifts of electricity from the peak to the mid peak if relevant and to the off peak periods during all seasons of the year and particularly during the winter 3 the structure and number of labour shifts during the day and weather are important factors in determining the response of business customers to the tou rates 4 price elasticities vary substantially over the seasons and across sic groups they do not vary with customer size

optimal departures from marginal cost pricing focuses on departures from marginal cost pricing optimal allocation or resources level of tax revenue that will be collected by the government theorems developed for resource allocation ebsco