transmission system management and pricing new paradigms and international comparisons the transmission system once the necessary but nearly invisible component of the electric power system is now the focus of physical electrical and financial attention of the utility and more significantly their potential suppliers customers this paper has three primary objectives the first is to present a discussion of a new paradigm for the electric power industry the second is to review transmission pricing options specifically those utilizing either long run lrmc or short run srmc marginal cost based approaches the third is to provide a review of innovative approaches to transmission asset management and finance as seen from international experience

optimal bidding strategies and modeling of imperfect information among competitive generators the emerging electricity market behaves more like an oligopoly than a perfectly competitive market due to special features such as a limited number of producers large investment size barrier to entry transmission constraints and transmission losses which discourage purchase from distant suppliers this makes it practicable for only a few independent power suppliers to service a given geographic region and in this imperfect market each power supplier can increase its own profit through strategic bidding the profit of each supplier is influenced to varying extents by differences in the degree of imperfection of knowledge of rival suppliers a new framework to build bidding strategies for power suppliers in an electricity market is presented in this paper it is assumed that each supplier bids a linear supply function and that the system is dispatched to minimize customer payments each supplier chooses the coefficients in the linear supply function to maximize benefits subject to expectations about how rival suppliers will bid a stochastic optimization formulation is developed and two methods proposed for describing and solving this problem a numerical example serves to illustrate the essential features of the approach and the results are used to investigate the potential market power

optimal integrated generation bidding and scheduling with risk management under a deregulated daily power market in the deregulated power industry a generation company genco sells energy and ancillary services primarily through bidding at a daily market developing effective strategies to optimize hourly bid curves for a hydrothermal power system to maximize profits becomes one of the most important tasks of a genco this paper presents a unified framework for optimizing energy and reserve bidding strategies under a deregulated market in view of high volatilities of market clearing prices mcp the hourly mcps and reserve prices are modeled as discrete random variables whose probability mass functions are predicted with a classification based neural network approach the mean variance method is applied to manage bidding risks where a risk penalty term related to mcp and reserve price variances is added to the objective function to avoid buying too much power from the market at high prices a genco may also require covering at least a certain percentage of its own customer load this self scheduling requirement is modeled similar to the system demand in traditional unit commitment problems the formulation is a stochastic mixed integer optimization with a separable structure an optimization based algorithm combining lagrangian relaxation and stochastic dynamic programming is presented to optimize bids for both energy and reserve markets numerical testing based on an 11 unit system in new england market shows that the method can significantly reduce profit variances and thus reduce bidding risks near optimal energy and reserve bid curves are obtained in 4 5 minutes on a 600 hz pentium iii pc efficient for daily use

welfare measurement for environmental improvements using the hedonic model the case of nonparametric marginal prices abstract research in environmental and natural resource economics frequently requires the use of hedonic models because of the differentiated products involved this is true for studies of the relationship between environmental quality and property values or wages or between the characteristics of a recreation site and the demand for its services an obvious use of such studies is in estimating willingness to pay for improvements with differentiated products there are usually nonlinear hedonic price schedules and thus nonlinear budget constraints this makes welfare analysis difficult because standard duality results no longer hold this paper develops a technique for estimating a psuedo demand system that can be used to derive exact measures of consumer welfare change similar techniques are developed for producers with a psuedo profit function that can be converted to an exact measure of the change in quasi rents or rents the paper also shows that the distance function can be used to develop an ex ante measure of welfare change

strategic self dispatch considering ramping costs in deregulated power markets ramp rates of generators are generally specified within elastic range of the strength of the shaft to safeguard the rotor from fatigue these limits can however be exceeded albeit at the risk of reducing the rotor life such effects on the rotor life can be compensated by incorporating appropriate ramping costs power demand and power price in deregulated power markets have shown a tendency of sudden wide excursions over short intervals of time the ability to respond to such fast change in demand and price can be quite rewarding this provides the motivation to utilize the ramping rates beyond traditional elastic limits this paper studies the strategic use of ramping rates beyond elastic limits in a power producer s self dispatch in a power market with price and demand volatility a set of ramping processes has been developed from ramping cost versus ramping time relationships to derive the total operation cost including ramping costs for various levels of ramping rates exceeding elastic limits a thorough theoretical analysis has been conducted for the selection of the optimal ramping process under different conditions a numerical example is presented to highlight the potential benefits from the optimal use of these ramping processes it is seen that the benefit from the strategic use of ramp rates beyond elastic limits not only depends on the high price in the power market but also on the initial loading of the generator which limits the capacity available for dispatch

the organizational economics of power brokers and centrally dispatched power pools introduction economic and the political or normative components of pool structure power pools are partnerships among corporately unaffiliated electric utility compansubsidy free cost allocation ies formed to realize cost savings through mutual cooperation there are many ways in solutions to the first organizational probwhich cooperation can reduce the collective lem are described as tight or loose fedcosts of the utilities in a region including joint eral energy regulatory commission 1981 system planning and emergency energy excramer and tschirhart 1983 in some rechange but one aspect of cooperation is comgions of the united states particularly in the mon to all power pools within a geographinortheast individual firms have yielded subcal region and at any given time some utilities stantial amounts of authority over their own typically experience higher short run margeneration facilities establishing computerginal costs than others owing to differences of controlled dispatching of the region s plants plant mix or instantaneous loads when the regardless of ownership to realize the greatest firms with low marginal costs increase their reduction in energy costs in other regions production and sell this economy energy to notably florida utilities have chosen to retain the higher cost firms the poolwide cost of their autonomy and institute an information generation is decreased ertclearinghouse or energy broker to facilitate owing to this opportunity for cost savings short run power transactions that reduce the the firms in a region are confronted with an pool s energy costs cohen 1982 no matter organizational problem having two compowhat organizational form is used a pool must nents 1 what should the firms do to realize also agree on a method to allocate the costs of the opportunity for savings and 2 how pooled production and experience has should the savings be allocated among the shown that the matter of determining an pool members the first question is technical equitable allocation of system costs can be solved by accounting for the costs of producone of the principal impediments to the fortion and the costs of transaction under altermation and maintenance of power pooling native organizational arrangements cramer agreements uri 1976 federal energy reguand tschirhart 1983 gegax and tschirhart latory commission 1981 1984 the second is normative and must be recently economists have taken an interanswered in terms of the notions of justice or est in the equity properties of alternative cost fairness held in common by pool members allocation mechanisms the equity concept the solution of the organizational problem employed in most studies is the notion of therefore requires a political economy subsidy freedom faulhaber 1975 taken framework for organizational analysis zald from cooperative game theory an allocation 1970 in which attention is given to both the of a power pool s generation costs is subsidy free if no individual or subgroup of pool mem

gaming and price spikes in electric power markets many challenging issues arise under the newly deregulated competitive electric power markets instead of centralized decision making in a vertically integrated environment as in the past decision making is now decentralized and driven by market forces gaming and price spikes have been observed in almost every electricity market but explicit analysis of these phenomena is rare in this paper the authors study historical bidding behavior to see how power suppliers and demand service providers were actually bidding in the california day ahead energy market based on their observations they formulate a prisoner s dilemma matrix game and introduce the notion of opportunistic tacit collision to explain strategic bidding behaviors in which suppliers withhold generation capacity from the market to drive up prices this explanation is applicable with or without market power transmission constraints and insufficient supply and is only enhanced by these factors their analysis is generally applicable to any uniform price electricity market in which there is significant insensitivity to price on the demand side

double sided auction mechanism design in electricity based on maximizing social welfare an efficient electricity double sided auction mechanism should control market power and enhance the social welfare of the electricity market based on this goal the paper designs a new double sided auction mechanism in the new mechanism the social welfare contribution of each participant plays a pivotal role because this contribution is the critical factor in market clearing payment settling and transaction matching rules in particular each winner of the auction can gain transfer payments according to his contribution to social welfare in the electricity market and this gives the mechanism the ability to control the market power of some participants at the same time this mechanism ensures that the market organizer balances his budget we then conduct a theoretical and empirical analysis based on the spanish electricity market both of the results show that compared to the uniform pricing mechanism the new mechanism can reduce market power of participants and enhance the social welfare of the electricity market

estimating compensating and equivalent income variations from hedonic price models abstract estimates of welfare changes obtained from hedonic price models usually consist of changes in marshallian consumer s surplus this note shows how compensating and equivalent income variations can be computed from the information available in hedonicprice models

an ordinal optimization based bidding strategy for electric power suppliers in the daily energy market the deregulation and reconstruction of the electric power industry worldwide raises many challenging issues related to the economic and reliable operation of electric power systems traditional unit commitment or hydrothermal scheduling problems have been integrated with generation resource bidding but the development of optimization based bidding strategies is only at a very preliminary stage this paper presents a bidding strategy based on the theory of ordinal optimization that the ordinal comparisons of performance measures are robust with respect to noise and modeling error and the problems become much easier if the optimization goal is softened from asking for the best to good enough solution the basic idea is to use an approximate model that describes the influence of bidding strategies on the market clearing prices mcp a nominal bid curve is obtained by solving optimal power generation for a given set of mcps via lagrangian relaxation then n bids are generated by perturbing the nominal bid curve the ordinal optimization method is applied to isolate a good enough set s that contains some good bids with high probability by performing rough evaluation the best bid is then selected by solving full hydrothermal scheduling or unit commitment problems for each of the bids in s using ordinal optimization approach we are able to obtain a good enough bidding strategy with reasonable computational effort numerical results using historical mcps from the california market and a generation company with 10 units show that the ordinal optimization based method is efficient

international policy coordination for financial market stability in the asian economies based on the understanding of financial crisis as the self fulfilling crisis of speculators belief system this paper examines the feasibility of introducing the tobin tax system to reduce financial volatility in the asian foreign exchange markets the model analysis in this paper provides the following policy implications to reduce the motivation to deviate from the policy coordination it is required to allow all tax revenues to collecting countries especially to singapore and hong kong even without the participation of the major western countries the start of the tax policy coordination in the asian region can have significant signalling effects to reduce speculative motivation

strategic bidding for minimum power output in the competitive power market as deregulation of the power industry is becoming a reality there has been an intense interest in the strategic bidding for suppliers to optimize their benefits the benefit gained by a supplier is related not only to its energy price bid curve but also to its submitted operational parameters such as minimum output etc this is especially so when market size is limited because of a limited number of competitors in the market itself or due to the transmission capacity constraints this paper addresses the study of strategic bidding for minimum output in a deregulated environment the impact of minimum output bids on the market result is analyzed a criterion with regard to minimum output bid to assess the outcome of competition among suppliers is derived the method to optimize the benefit from a supplier s viewpoint by adjusting the bids for the minimum output and price is proposed it is shown that an individual supplier can optimize its own benefit by fine tuning its minimum output and price when there are only a few suppliers dominating the market a fairly thorough theoretical analysis of the bidding for minimum output is illustrated with a numerical example

the mirage of fixed exchange rates this paper discusses the profound difficulties of maintaining fixed exchange rates in a world of expanding global capital markets contrary to popular wisdom industrialized country monetary authorities easily have the resources to defend exchange parities against virtually any private speculative attack but if their commitment to use those resources lacks credibility with markets the costs to the broader economy of defending an exchange rate peg can be very high the dynamic interplay between credibility and commitment is illustrated by the 1992 swedish and british crises and the 1994 95 mexican collapse we also discuss the small number of successful fixers

a currency crisis model with an optimising policymaker abstract a model is presented in which the abandonment of a fixed exchange rate regime is triggered by an optimising policymaker who wants to loosen monetary policy and boost aggregate demand agents in the foreign exchange market know the policymaker s objective function and build expectations of a regime switch into interest differentials the resulting rise in interest rates affects the policymaker s decision to switch regime it is shown that a rational expectations equilibrium exists where the fixed rate is abandoned in response to adverse demand shocks in some circumstances multiple equilibria arise which may lead to self fulfilling crises

application of actor critic learning algorithm for optimal bidding problem of a genco the optimal bidding for generation companies genco in the deregulated power market is an involved task the problem is formulated in the framework of the markov decision process mdp a discrete stochastic optimization method when the time span considered is 24 hours the temporal difference method becomes attractive for application the cumulative profit over the span is the objective function to be optimized the temporal difference technique and actor critic learning algorithm is employed an optimal strategy is devised to maximize the profit a market clearing system is included in the formulation simulation cases of three seven and ten participants are considered and the results obtained are discussed

the welfare economics of land use planning abstract this paper presents an empirical methodology for the evaluation of the benefits and costs of land use planning the technique is applied in the context of the town and country planning system of the uk and examines the gross and net benefits of land use regulation and their distribution across income groups the results show that the welfare and distributional impacts can be large

exact consumer s surplus and deadweight loss consumer s surplus is a widely used tool in applied welfare economics both economic theorists and cost benefit analysis often use consumer s surplus despite its somewhat dubious reputation the basic idea is to evaluate the value to a consumer or his willingness to pay for a change in price of a good from say pricep to pricep because price changes affect consumer welfare an evaluation of this effect is often a key input to public policy decisions yet consumer s surplus is probably the most controversial of widely used economic concepts both paul samuelson and ian little conclude that the economics profession would be better off without it it is my feeling of the situation that substantial agreement exists on the correct quantities to be measured the amount the consumer would pay or would need to be paid to be just as well off after the price change as he was before the price change the quantities correspond to john hicks compensating variation measures an alternative measure which takes ex post price change utility as the basis of comparison is hicks equivalent variation the controversy arises in the measurement of these quantities the usual measurement procedure is to use the area to the left of the marshallian market demand curve between two price levels jules dupuit originated this measure of welfare change and alfred marshall and hicks derived appropriate conditions for its use the primary condition for the area to the left of the demand curve to correspond to the compensating variation is to have constant marginal utility of income marshall gave this condition and if it holds the same quantity will be derived as the area to the left of the compensated hicksian demand curve this area to the left of the compensated demand curve is exactly what the compensating variation and equivalent variation measure thus the constant marginal utility of income is a sufficient condition for marshallian consumer s surplus to be equal to hicks consumer s surplus in this case arnold harberger s plea to use the welfare triangle as one half times the product of the price change times the quantity change to measure deadweight loss corresponds to the correct theoretical amount of welfare change in a recent paper robert willig derives bounds for the percentage difference between the correct measure of either the compensating or equivalent variation and the marshallian measure derived form the market demand curve his bounds which depend on the income elasticity of demand for the single good in the region of price change being considered as well as the proportion of the consumer s income spent on the good demonstrate that the marshallian consumer s surplus is often a good approximation to hicks consumer s surplus the fact that the proportion of the consumer s income spent matters as well as the income elasticity was first pointed out by harold hotelling willig contends that the approximation error will be less than the errors involved in estimating the demand curve thus he hopes to remove the need for apology that applied economists often need to give to theorists who remark on the inappropriateness of using marshallian consumer s surplus to measure welfare change however in this paper i show that for the case primarily considered by willig of a single price change which is also the situation in which consumer s surplus is often used in applied work no approximation is necessary professor of economics massachusetts institute of technology and research associate national bureau of economic research i would like to thank peter diamond erwin diewert daniel mcfadden robert merton robert solow hal varian joel yellin and the referees for help and comments research support from the national science foundation is acknowledged the reason that we still have two rather than one of samuelson s six measures of consumer s surplus arises from an index number problem of the correct basis for the welfare comparison i will give both measures but plan to concentrate on the compensating variation

a security constrained bid clearing system for the new zealand wholesale electricity market this paper reports upon the mathematical models and implementation of the scheduling pricing and dispatch spd application for the new zealand electricity market nzem spd analyzes bids for energy offers reserve offers and energy demands and recognizes explicitly the effects on bid clearing due to transmission congestion network losses reserve requirements and ramp rate limits advanced lp solution methods are utilized to solve the large scale constrained optimization problem results on a 67 bus test system and the nzem are included

incentive contracts and competitive bidding an increasing segment of economic activity is taking place in nonmarket situations in which economic agents act outside the traditional markets or create markets to deal with specific resource allocation problems one such problem involves the selection by a buyer of a contractor using a competitive bidding process competitive bidding is used extensively by the government for the selection of suppliers of goods and services and for the sale of resources such as offshore oil leases firms may use competitive bidding for the selection of certain suppliers of factor inputs and may attempt to sell certain products in markets in which competitive price quoting is the established market mechanism this paper is concerned with a bidding process in which a firm has an opportunity to bid on a project under the terms of an incentive contract incentive contracts

the advantage to hiding one s hand speculation and central bank intervention in the foreign exchange market abstract we analyze an asymmetric information model of sterilized intervention in the foreign exchange market we characterize an equilibrium in which a central bank with inside information about its exchange rate target trades with risk averse speculators who have private information about future spot rates the model identifies circumstances in which perverse responses to intervention will be observed i e the domestic currency depreciates when the central bank purchases it and it provides conditions under which the exchange rate will be highly sensitive to intervention the model also provides an explanation for two forms of policy secrecy i secrecy about the scale of an intervention operation is always desirable ii secrecy about the target is sometimes desirable

tax competition and leviathan abstract attitudes towards downward pressure on tax rates from international tax competition depend on attitudes towards government this paper synthesises the two extremes which as in other areas of public finance have dominated the debate typically being presented as stark alternatives the view of government as a leviathan from which tax competition emerges as a useful constraint on policy makers and the view of government as a benevolent maximiser of their citizens welfare from which it emerges as a source of inefficiency conditions are derived under which when policy makers are neither entirely benevolent nor wholly self serving tax coordination benefits the representative citizen

a study of basic bidding strategy in clearing pricing auctions this paper models bidding behaviors of suppliers in electricity auction markets under clearing pricing rule and with some simplified bidding assumptions optimal bidding strategy of suppliers is derived by solving a set of differential equations that specify the necessary conditions for bidders to maximize their expected payoffs the derived result indicates that bidders have incentives to mark up their bids above their costs of production the amount of markup depends on the probability of winning below and on the margin that are computed from the cost distribution of all suppliers market demand and the number of suppliers participating in the auction

are grains of sand in the wheels of international finance sufficient to do the job when boulders are often required this paper criticises the effectiveness of a tobin tax in acting as a deterrent to short run round trip speculation on exchange rate movements it is demonstrated that given the usual magnitude of a proposed tobin tax the deterrent to short term speculation will be negligible and in all likelihood smaller than the deterrent to real trade flows and arbitrage activities finally an alternative proposal for preventing currency speculations while creating incentives for global full employment based on keynes s 1940s writings is proposed

consumer payment minimization in power pool auctions this paper presents a new methodology within the framework of centralized optimization for calculating optimal generation schedules that minimize energy payments by power pool consumers this paper addresses issues related to market structure and the operation of power pools such as bid evaluation generator no load and start up cost recovery generator unit operating constraints and market clearing price determination unlike conventional unit commitment algorithms that minimize total energy production costs the method presented here minimizes payments by power pool consumers a payment minimization objective leads to a different unit commitment and dispatch solution and lower market clearing prices additionally optimal allocation of generator no load and start up costs over the scheduling period is integrated in the bid evaluation process leading to a further reduction in consumer payments

a two tier matrix game approach for obtaining joint bidding strategies in ftr and energy markets transmission congestion results in revenue collected from the loads that often exceeds the payment made to the generators the financial transmission right ftr is an instrument that allows the independent system operator iso to redistribute the excess revenue congestion charge among the market participants generators and loads hold ftrs to hedge against congestion charges since the revenues from the ftr and energy markets are interdependent each generator and load must have a joint bidding strategy for ftr and energy markets to maximize its total payoff this paper presents a two tier matrix game model that allows the generators and loads to obtain joint bidding strategies the model also allows the isos and the market designers to assess the impact of various network configurations and rules on market performance e g market power the two tier model considers multiple participants multidimensional bid vectors network contingencies and varying demand we conducted a numerical validation of our model by analyzing the three node network studied by joskow and tirole 2000 additional numerical studies were conducted on a five node network to examine the impact of holding ftrs on the bidding strategies in the energy market and joint payoffs of the participants

application of auctions as a pricing mechanism for the interchange of electric power the expected move to a market based electric power industry will significantly change electric utility operations these changes will fundamentally alter the pricing of electric power how this pricing will be accomplished is a key issue traditionally embedded cost based methods have been used spot pricing has received attention as a possible approach in a market based electric power environment another market based approach is the use of auctions this paper presents the application of a sequential sealed bid and sealed offer auction to the pricing of electric power by using linear programming

purchase allocation and demand bidding in electric power markets the purchase allocation problem is one of the most important problems faced by an electric energy service provider under new market environments the optimal purchase allocation problem for dual electric power markets and demand bid generation are discussed in this paper the price volatility is explicitly considered in purchase allocation problems and the sequential nature is modeled by conditional stochastic characteristics an analytical solution for the optimal allocation is derived with given demand and statistical characteristics of the market prices the method for generating demand bids for purchaser based on market allocation and price forecasting is then developed the numerical simulations for market allocation and bid generation are demonstrated based on the actual data of the u s california power market

an energy brokerage system with emission trading and allocation of cost savings an energy brokerage system can achieve lower emission levels for interconnected electric utilities in a cost effective way the paper presents a linear programming formulation of an energy brokerage system in an operational planning framework emission trading among utilities is envisaged to achieve emission reduction targets the power and emission buy sell quotes for individual utilities are computed and communicated to a central broker the broker determines the power and emission interchange schedule which maximizes the power system savings for all participating utilities the shapley value criterion is proposed for allocation of cost savings among the utilities this criterion reflects the true marginal contribution of a utility to the aggregate system savings and hence is superior to the existing methods of cost savings allocation

gaming the uniform price spot market quantitative analysis in this paper a range of indices have been derived to quantify the incentives to game the uniform price spot market the gain of a portfolio generator due to withdrawing capacity and or inflating the price bid has been found to be proportional to the in merit market share of the gaming generator and the inverse combined price elasticity of supply demand a gaming index has also been derived as a modification of the herfindahl hirschman index which takes into account the reduction in the number of competitors as the demand goes up and the benefit the portfolio generators take from gaming price elastic loads reduce gaming opportunities but do not remove them application of the indices has been illustrated using the the spot market in england and wales the results seem to confirm practical evidence from many countries that spot markets are vulnerable to gaming

congestion influence on bidding strategies in an electricity market much of the research on bidding strategies in an electricity market has focused on idealized situations where participants have limited market power and the transmission system is not constrained yet congestion may act to effectively give a bidder market power and consequently the ability to influence the market clearing price in such a noncompetitive situation the bidding strategies of market participants will change in this paper the electrical power market is modeled as an oligopoly market and the cournot quantity model is applied to the bidding strategy problem the bidding process with congestion management is modeled as a three level optimization problem a statistical methodology is then proposed as a solution for large systems

strategic aspects of public finance in a world with high capital mobility abstract in a world with high capital mobility an increase in equity taxes is likely to induce a capital out flow it is commonly believed that in consequence there may be an under provision of public goods when governments have only equity taxes at their disposal this paper compares the provision of public goods under cooperative and non cooperative tax policies suprisingly the non cooperative regime may result in either an over or an under provision of public goods it is also shown that the gains from coordination increase as countries become atomistic

price taker bidding strategy under price uncertainty this paper provides a framework to obtain the optimal bidding strategy of a price taker producer an appropriate forecasting tool is used to estimate the probability density functions of next day hourly market clearing prices this probabilistic information is used to formulate a self scheduling profit maximization problem that is solved taking advantage of its particular structure the solution of this problem allows deriving a simple yet informed bidding rule results from a realistic case study are discussed in detail

collapsing exchange rate regimes some linear examples abstract we construct a pair of linear examples to study the collapse time of a fixed exchange rate regime the first example is a perfect foresight continuous time model which allows calculation of the exact collapse time and the tracking of reserves the second example is a discrete time stochastic model which yields an endogenous probability distribution over the collapse time and produces a forward discount of the exchange rate

information sharing and tax competition among governments abstract the residence based principle has been proposed as a second best measure to the full international coordination of capital tax policies this system requires that tax authorities have full information about the foreign investments of their residents however the degree of information transmission among governments can be considered as a strategic variable we show that under some features of the tax system there will not be any information sharing while there are institutional arrangements under which governments may transmit partial information for strategic purposes we also show that full information sharing is not necessarily a pareto optimum

would a tobin tax have saved the ems this paper scrutinizes the claim by eichengreen tobin and wyplosz 1995 that a small tax on foreign exchange transactions would help to stabilize the european monetary system we present a target zone model a la svensson 1994 in which an optimizing government is faced with a trade off between its foreign exchange and its domestic objectives the introduction of a tobin tax is shown to improve the credibility of the peg by relaxing the foreign exchange rate constraint and making it less costly for the government to stay in the fixed exchange rate system we calibrate the model using data on the french franc in 1991 93 and show that the stabilizing effect of a 0 1 tobin tax would have been quite sizeable copyright 1996 by the editors of the scandinavian journal of economics

a coalition formation approach to equilibrium federations the authors develop a model in which states may choose to form coalitions to capture efficiency gains from policy coordination joining a coalition entails setting the policy variable to maximize the coalition s aggregate payoff at a nash equilibrium against nonmembers and to commit to a transfer scheme to share the gains with two states the unique equilibrium structure is complete federation with more than two states incomplete federation can be the unique equilibrium interpreting this result in terms of custom unions the trend to trading bloc formation may be equilibrium behavior even with cooperation and transfers within customs unions copyright 1997 by american economic association

strategic bidding in an energy brokerage this focus of this paper is to present a framework in which strategies may developed for the individual participants in an energy brokerage such a framework is expected to be important with the increasing interest in electricity market structures such as the energy brokerage that deregulation has produced to illustrate the process of strategic bidding a simple suboptimal bidding strategy is presented with the aid of a numerical example the bidding strategy must be suboptimal because of the amount of unknown information about the other bidders further tuning of this strategy will be required before application to realistic scenarios