coordinated price maker operation of large energy storage units in nodal energy markets in this paper a new optimization framework is proposed to coordinate the operation of large price maker and geographically dispersed energy storage battery systems in a nodal transmission constrained energy market the energy storage units are assumed to be investor owned and independently operated seeking to maximize their total profit various design factors are taken into consideration such as the location size efficiency and charge and discharge rates of the energy storage units as well as the joint impact of the energy storage operations on the locational marginal prices while the formulated optimization problem is originally nonlinear and hard to solve nonlinearities are tackled both in the objective function and in the constraints and the problem is transformed into a tractable mixed integer linear program for which the global optimal solutions are found for the charge and discharge schedules of each energy storage unit both deterministic and stochastic design scenarios are addressed various case studies are presented it is observed that transmission line congestion is often but not always desirable for the coordinated storage systems locational diversity practice of arbitrage robust design self scheduling versus economic bidding and the overall power system performance are also investigated

price discrimination and investment incentives abstract we examine a model of a monopolist selling to two segments of consumers with different preferences for quality we show that if the firm is unable to price discriminate between the segments then there is less investment in quality we find that both consumer segments and society overall may suffer if the firm is unable to price discriminate we extend the model to duopoly competition and find that our results still hold

changing to gray decentralization and the emergence of volatile socio legal configurations in central kalimantan indonesia decentralization policy narratives articulated by donor agencies tend to describe decentralization as a technical process of policy design and implementation advocating decentralization as a solution to particular problems drawing on research carried out in the indonesian province of central kalimantan following the inception of a decentralization program this article examines how political processes at the national district and village levels have led to highly volatile socio legal configurations that create insecurity and heighten resource conflicts it concludes that while the politics surrounding decentralization in different domains have ensured that the patterns of governance inherited from the past remain precariously distant from the objectives of good governance decentralization has also opened up space for positive changes

is greater fishery access better for the poor explaining de territorialisation of the tonle sap cambodia abstractthe general tendency for states in south east asia is to claim exclusive rights over natural resources at the cost of impoverishing the people who depend on them for subsistence however contrary to what one might expect the government of cambodia initiated unconventional intervention it cancelled the fishing lots system the de facto property rights that had granted exclusive access to certain aquatic resources to licence holders these interventions focused on cambodia s largest lake question the rationale behind such state measures to forfeit control this paper demonstrates that political interests such as garnering election votes and circumventing certain bureaucratic agencies explain this radical shift in policy opening up previously exclusive lot areas to the communities won immediate support from the poor fishermen however now that the lake is under a more diverse if obscure system of governance managed by multiple agencies the environmental and social consequences of the policy

the welfare effects of third degree price discrimination in the author examines third degree price discrimination by an upstream monopolist in an intermediate good market discrimination is motivated by the fact that downstream firms differ in their abilities to integrate backward into supply of the input the author shows that under reasonable specifications of equilibrium price discrimination leads to all buyers facing higher input prices in other cases discrimination raises some prices and lowers others the author derives conditions under which discrimination lowers welfare by reducing total output and shows that in some markets discrimination will raise welfare by preventing socially inefficient backward integration copyright 1987 by american economic association

engaging simplifications community based resource management market processes and state agendas in upland southeast asia abstract in the struggle to secure resource rights for rural populations who gain their livelihoods from state claimed lands advocacy agendas highlight community interest in and capacity for sustainable resource management in the uplands of southeast asia the strategic simplifications of community based natural resource management cbnrm advocacy are being translated into legal frameworks and program initiatives which make rights conditional upon particular forms of social organization and livelihood as well as conservation outcomes when set in the context of agricultural intensification among both indigenous and migrant populations and the desire of many upland dwellers to claim the benefits of a fuller citizenship cbnrm offers a problematic basis for justice

modeling electricity wholesale markets with model predictive and profit maximizing agents a new agent based electricity market model is presented in which participants correspond to generation plants as well as storage power plants in contrast to agent based models where agents use learning heuristics and trial and error approaches to maximize their profits the proposed model predictive bidding uses multi step optimization to find bidding curves which maximize the expected discounted profit over a time horizon in the future the profit is calculated based on an hourly price forward curve hpfc whereby the hpfc is constructed taking several factors into account in addition a price adjuster is used in these calculations which allows the participant to take into account his market power the resulting optimization problem for each agent is solved using dynamic programming a case study is carried out in which the proposed agent based market model is applied to the four countries switzerland germany italy and france to study the effects of constrained cross border capacities the simulations show that the transmission system operators as well as the power generating units have no incentive to build additional cross border capacity since it lowers their profits

decision making under uncertainty capturing dynamic brand choice processes in turbulent consumer goods markets we construct two models of the behavior of consumers in an environment where there is uncertainty about brand attributes in our models both usage experience and advertising exposure give consumers noisy signals about brand attributes consumers use these signals to update their expectations of brand attributes in a bayesian manner the two models are 1 a dynamic model with immediate utility maximization and 2 a dynamic forward looking model in which consumers maximize the expected present value of utility over a planning horizon given this theoretical framework we derive from the bayesian learning framework how brand choice probabilities depend on past usage experience and advertising exposures we then form likelihood functions for the models and estimate them on nielsen scanner data for detergent we find that the functional forms for experience and advertising effects that we derive from the bayesian learning framework fit the data very well relative to flexible ad hoc functional forms such as exponential smoothing and also perform better at out of sample prediction another finding is that in the context of consumer learning of product attributes although the forward looking model fits the data statistically better at conventional significance levels both models produce similar parameter estimates and policy implications our estimates indicate that consumers are risk averse with respect to variation in brand attributes which discourages them from buying unfamiliar brands using the estimated behavioral models we perform various scenario evaluations to find how changes in marketing strategy affect brand choice both in the short and long run a key finding obtained from the policy experiments is that advertising intensity has only weak short run effects but a strong cumulative effect in the long run the substantive content of the paper is potentially of interest to academics in marketing economics and decision sciences as well as product managers marketing research managers and analysts interested in studying the effectiveness of marketing mix strategies our paper will be of particular interest to those interested in the long run effects of advertising note that our estimation strategy requires us to specify explicit behavioral models of consumer choice behavior derive the implied relationships among choice probabilities past purchases and marketing mix variables and then estimate the behavioral parameters of each model such an estimation strategy is referred to as structural estimation and econometric models that are based explicitly on the consumer s maximization problem and whose parameters are parameters of the consumers utility functions or of their constraints are referred to as structural models a key benefit of the structural approach is its potential usefulness for policy evaluation the parameters of structural models are invariant to policy that is they do not change due to a change in the policy in contrast the parameters of reduced form brand choice models are in general functions of marketing strategy variables e g consumer response to price may depend on pricing policy as a result the predictions of reduced form models for the outcomes of policy experiments may be unreliable because in making the prediction one must assume that the model parameters are unaffected by the policy change since the agents in our models choose among many alternative brands their choice probabilities take the form of higher order integrals we employ monte carlo methods to approximate these integrals and estimate our models using simulated maximum likelihood estimation of the dynamic forward looking model also requires that a dynamic programming problem be solved in order to form the likelihood function for this we use a new approximation method based on simulation and interpolation techniques these estimation techniques may be of interest to researchers and policy makers in many fields where dynamic choice among discrete alternatives is important such as marketing decision sciences labor and health economics and industrial organization

dynamic convexification within nested benders decomposition using lagrangian relaxation an application to the strategic bidding problem abstract many decomposition algorithms like benders decomposition and stochastic dual dynamic programming are limited to convex optimization problems in this paper we utilize a dynamic convexification method that makes use of lagrangian relaxation to overcome this limitation and enables the modeling of non convex multi stage problems using decomposition algorithms though the algorithm is confined by the duality gap of the problem being studied the computed upper bounds for maximization problems are at least as good as those found via a linear programming relaxation approach we apply the method to the strategic bidding problem for a hydroelectric producer in which we ask what is the revenue maximizing production schedule for a single price maker hydroelectric producer in a deregulated bid based market because the price maker s future revenue function has a sawtooth shape we model it using mixed integer linear programming to remedy the non concavity issues associated with modeling the future revenue function as a mixed integer linear program we model the price maker s bidding decision utilizing both benders decomposition and lagrangian relaxation we demonstrate the utility of our algorithm through an illustrative example and through three case studies in which we model electricity markets in el salvador honduras and nicaragua

price discrimination and patent policy patent and antitrust policy are often presumed to be in conflict as an important example there is ongoing controversy about whether price discrimination by a patent holder is an illegal or socially undesirable exploitation of monopoly power in this article we show that no conflict exists in many price discrimination cases even ignoring the dynamic effects on incentives for innovation third degree price discrimination by patent holders can raise static social welfare in fact pareto improvements may well occur welfare gains occur because price discrimination allows patent holders to open new markets and to achieve economies of scale or learning further even in cases where discrimination incurs static welfare losses it may be efficient relative to other mechanisms such as length of patent life for rewarding innovators with profits

nash equilibrium in strategic bidding a binary expansion approach this paper presents a mixed integer linear programming solution approach for the equilibrium problem with equilibrium constraints epec problem of finding the nash equilibrium ne in strategic bidding in short term electricity markets a binary expansion be scheme is used to transform the nonlinear nonconvex ne problem into a mixed integer linear problem milp which can be solved by commercially available computational systems the be scheme can be applicable to cournot bertrand or joint price quantity bidding models the approach is illustrated in case studies with configurations derived from the 95 gw brazilian system including unit commitment decisions to the price maker agents

from privatization to deindustrialization implications of chinese rural industry and the ownership debate revisited summary this paper examines the evolution of chinese rural industry since the rural reform in the late 1970s and revisits the debate on the role of ownership based on a case study of w county in southern jiangsu province as well as drawing on national data the author shows that the community based market dynamic had been a key factor in the expansion of rural enterprises and that its weakening in recent years has led to the closing of village enterprises and deindustrialization of the countryside large scale land expropriation sponsored by local government is the principal factor responsible for the change

optimal bidding strategies for hydro electric producers a literature survey in a competitive environment with bid based markets power generation companies desire to develop bidding strategies that maximize their revenue in this paper we ask what approaches and methodologies have been used to model the bidding problem for hydro electric producers we present the problem s developments over time and through reviewing different variants of the problem progressively build to the case in which the agent is a price maker hydro electric producer in each variant of the bidding problem we examine how the approaches used to solve it may or may not be applicable to other variants last for the price maker hydro electric producer s bidding problem we recognize the most recent developments and illuminate a path for future efforts

a review on risk constrained hydropower scheduling in deregulated power market in deregulated power market hydro producer has in principle no other objective than to produce electricity and sell with maximum profit with lower market risk attention must focus on profit uncertainty caused by uncertainty in spot prices and reservoir inflow the purpose of this review is to assess the state of the art in hydropower operations considering profit risk under uncertainty and consider future directions for additional research and application physical and financial tools to hedge risk in bilateral market and risk assessment methods are all discussed in detail furthermore production resources can also be used to manage risk to a certain extent this concept when be integrated with variety of risk management methods under stochastic optimal framework has operational significance for hydro producer participating in electricity market

making land rights accessible social movements and political legal innovation in the rural philippines abstract in recent years rule of law and legal reform has grown to be a major concern of national governments international financial institutions development agencies and donor organisations part of this concern has focused on expanding access to justice for the poor however little effort has gone into understanding the role of justice sector institutions in shaping the opportunities and limits of redistributive justice little attention has been paid to the actual workings of obstacles entrenched within the justice sector to land reform for example instead pro market scholars cite difficult legal problems as a reason to turn away from state led land reform and toward market oriented land policies yet as this paper shows a closer look at the details of dynamics around land reform in the philippines suggests that political legal problems associated with implementation of the agrarian reform law can be overcome under certain conditions it is argued that for rural poor claimants it is important

governance institutions resource rights regimes and the informal mining sector regulatory complexities in indonesia summary this study examines how shifting resource governance regimes affect labor inequities in the small scale mining sector in indonesia it focuses on the implications of governance decentralization processes and mining regulation reforms for indigenous and migrant populations who rely on informal unlicensed mining for income in central kalimantan while the findings illustrate the territorially uneven impacts of recent reforms they highlight how dominant paradigms that prioritize the enforcement of property rights schemes have contributed to problems of livelihood insecurity and poor environmental governance the article urges for more nuanced attention to contested articulations of power as well as local resource rights and institutional arrangements to assist rural communities in reversing marginalization

hydrothermal market simulator using game theory assessment of market power the aim of this work is to build a model able to simulate a hydrothermal electric power market based on simple bids to a power exchange the model studies the behavior of different market agents in a short term horizon and delivers information about spot prices use of water and other relevant variables initially a thermoelectric market is simulated through a static model based on cournot concepts the addition of hydroelectric power stations and time dependencies is made later using a dynamic programming algorithm to build a dynamic model in each stage and state of the dynamic programming a nash cournot equilibrium is determined to assess the behavior of the thermoelectric power stations static model different strategies that firms can follow and the consequences of each one of them are analyzed market power mitigation effects of physical and financial bilateral contracts are also investigated a case study with data on the chilean power system is presented and analyzed

weekly self scheduling forward contracting and pool involvement for an electricity producer an adaptive robust optimization approach abstract this paper addresses the optimization under uncertainty of the self scheduling forward contracting and pool involvement of an electricity producer operating a mixed power generation station which combines thermal hydro and wind sources and uses a two stage adaptive robust optimization approach in this problem the wind power production and the electricity pool price are considered to be uncertain and are described by uncertainty convex sets to solve this problem two variants of a constraint generation algorithm are proposed and their application and characteristics discussed both algorithms are used to solve two case studies based on two producers each operating equivalent generation units differing only in the thermal units characteristics their market strategies are investigated for three different scenarios corresponding to as many instances of electricity price forecasts the effect of the producers approach whether conservative or more risk prone is also investigated by solving each instance for multiple values of the so called budget parameter it was possible to conclude that this parameter influences markedly the producers strategy in terms of scheduling profit forward contracting and pool involvement these findings are presented and analyzed in detail and an attempted rationale is proposed to explain the less intuitive outcomes regarding the computational results these show that for some instances the two variants of the algorithms have a similar performance while for a particular subset of them one variant has a clear superiority

environmental entitlements dynamics and institutions in community based natural resource management abstract while community based natural resource management cbnrm now attracts widespread international attention its practical implementation frequently falls short of expectations this paper contributes to emerging critiques by focusing on the implications of intracommunity dynamics and ecological heterogeneity it builds a conceptual framework highlighting the central role of institutions regularized patterns of behavior between individuals and groups in society in mediating environment society relationships grounded in an extended form of entitlements analysis the framework explores how differently positioned social actors command environmental goods and services that are instrumental to their well being further insights are drawn from analyses of social difference new dynamic ecology new institutional economics structuration theory and landscape history the theoretical argument is illustrated with case material from india south africa and ghana

governance land and distribution a discussion on the political economy of community based conservation abstract the effectiveness of community based conservation cbc has been under discussion through the review of cbc initiatives in developing countries we contribute to the debate by analysing how players influence different factors that determine the outcomes of cbc we highlight several points first the promise of benefits has been overshadowed by constraints on the extraction of natural resources along with the use of governmental schemes to extract partially the rents from cbc which has left little to share inside the communities second cbc design and implementation has often overlooked the asymmetries of power within the community and at the individual level which has produced unequal access to the design decision making and outcomes of this activity third while the elites have had a determinant role in shaping the governance of cbc external agents promotion of cbc has tended to reproduce the existent negotiating power at the community local and national levels fourth land contestation plays a key role in the dynamics of relationship and conflict between the governments corporate interests and the communities finally cbc adaptation to new scenarios depends critically on the process of community empowerment and the building of networks with external agents

participatory processes in the soy conflicts in paraguay and argentina abstract within emerging environmental conflicts different participatory processes have developed as alternatives to the top down models that have dominated policy making in this paper we focus on conflicts over the expansion of soy production we analyze three issues related to top down vs bottom up participatory processes and how they affect the proposals coming out of these processes who counts as stakeholder the role of social movements what counts as participation the role of mobilization and who has power to select stakeholders and issues make decisions and influence preferences to explore these issues we present a case study of two parallel participatory processes in rural areas of paraguay and argentina one of these the roundtable on responsible soy is top down created by large agri business multinationals and international conservation ngos with the support of the governments in the region and has focused on establishing criteria for responsible soy the other is bottom up self organized by peasant and civil society organizations and focused on stopping soy expansion and promoting food sovereignty the findings highlight the potential of bottom up processes to promote true agricultural sustainability while at the same time emphasizing the need for more research on grassroots participatory processes and their potential and limitations in different contexts

an individual welfare maximization algorithm for electricity markets an algorithm that allows a market participant to maximize its individual welfare in electricity spot markets is presented the use of the algorithm in determining market equilibrium points called nash equilibria is demonstrated the start of the algorithm is a spot market model that uses the optimal power flow opf with a full representation of the transmission system and inclusion of consumer bidding the algorithm utilizes price and dispatch sensitivities available from the hessian matrix and gradient of the opf to help determine an optimal change in an individual s bid the algorithm is shown to be successful in determining local welfare maxima and the prospects for scaling the algorithm up to realistically sized systems are very good nash equilibria are investigated assuming all participants attempt to maximize their individual welfare this is done by iteratively solving the individual welfare maximization algorithm until all individuals stop modifying their bids

price maker economic bidding in two settlement pool based markets the case of time shiftable loads in this paper a new scenario based stochastic optimization framework is proposed for price maker economic bidding in day ahead and real time markets the presented methodology is general and can be applied to both demand and supply bids that is no restrictive assumptions are made on the characteristics of the pool and its agents however our focus is on the operation of time shiftable loads with deadlines because they play a central role in creating load flexibility and enhancing demand response and peak load shaving programs both basic and complex time shiftable load types are addressed where the latter includes time shiftable loads that are uninterruptible have per time slot consumption limits or ramp constraints or comprise several smaller time shiftable subloads four innovative analytical steps are presented in order to transform the originally nonlinear and hard to solve price maker economic bidding optimization problem into a tractable mixed integer linear program accordingly the global optimal solutions are found for the price and energy bids within a relatively short amount of computational time a detailed illustrative case study along with multiple case studies based on the california energy market data are presented it is observed that the proposed optimal price maker economic bidding approach outperforms optimal price maker self scheduling as well as even load distribution

market offering strategies for hydroelectric generators this paper considers the problem of offering electricity produced by a series of hydroelectric reservoirs to a pool type central market the market model is a simplified version of the new zealand wholesale electricity market with prices modelled by a first order markov process the demand for electricity is not explicitly modelled the hydroelectric generator is assumed to be unable to influence market prices i e to be a price taker we discuss the resulting stochastic dynamic program methods for its solution and the explicit optimal offer curves that it produces it is shown that the utility function is monotone increasing with respect to both reservoir level and current price however the optimal offer curves need not be monotone this is shown by example numerical results are provided

pool strategy of a price maker wind power producer we consider the problem of a wind power producer trading energy in short term electricity markets the producer is a price taker in the day ahead market but a price maker in the balancing market and aims at optimizing its expected revenues from these market floors the problem is formulated as a mathematical program with equilibrium constraints mpec and cast as a mixed integer linear program milp which can be solved employing off the shelf optimization software the optimal bid is shown to deliver significantly improved performance compared to traditional bids such as the conditional mean or median forecast of wind power distribution finally sensitivity analyses are carried out to assess the impact on the offering strategy of the producer s penetration in the market of the correlation between wind power production and residual system deviation and of the shape of the forecast distribution of wind power production

market opening under third degree price discrimination there are frequently regulatory and antitrust pressures for firms to cease price discrimination and practice uniform pricing such pressures however generally have negative welfare consequences when they lead to weaker markets not being served this paper derives conditions that determine when price discrimination will induce service to a market market opening that would not be served under a regime of price uniformity the factors that favor market opening under price discrimination are a large market share for the strong market profit margins in the two markets that are far apart and concave rather than convex demand curves copyright 1994 by blackwell publishing ltd

generation scheduling in a deregulated system the norwegian case the paper gives an overview of the deregulated electricity supply system in norway with emphasis on the generation scheduling approach procedures and tools for long medium and short term scheduling are described scheduling is carried out by each individual utility since scheduling is based on profit maximizing the spot market price is a very important factor this price is varying and uncertain however a part of the paper describes how to deal with this by considering the spot market price as an exogenously given stochastic variable it is shown how to extend the common water value computations so as to handle this case implications to the medium and short term scheduling are also discussed

generation expansion planning with large amounts of wind power via decision dependent stochastic programming power generation expansion planning needs to deal with future uncertainties carefully given that the invested generation assets will be in operation for a long time many stochastic programming models have been proposed to tackle this challenge however most previous works assume predetermined future uncertainties i e fixed random outcomes with given probabilities in several recent studies of generation assets planning e g thermal versus renewable new findings show that the investment decisions could affect the future uncertainties as well to this end this paper proposes a multistage decision dependent stochastic optimization model for long term large scale generation expansion planning where large amounts of wind power are involved in the decision dependent model the future uncertainties are not only affecting but also affected by the current decisions in particular the probability distribution function is determined by not only input parameters but also decision variables to deal with the nonlinear constraints in our model a quasi exact solution approach is then introduced to reformulate the multistage stochastic investment model to a mixed integer linear programming model the wind penetration investment decisions and the optimality of the decision dependent model are evaluated in a series of multistage case studies the results show that the proposed decision dependent model provides effective optimization solutions for long term generation expansion planning

equity reexamined a study of community based rainwater harvesting in rajasthan india summary equity is central to community based development efforts but community perspectives on equity are seldom examined in the development literature this study investigates how equity in a rainwater harvesting program is understood and practiced in two rajasthani communities drawing on bourdieu s concept of symbolic capital we find that the symbolic capital accrued from contributing to the project is as central to community understandings of equity as the distribution of benefits from the project we find that a continuing sense of community despite heterogeneity is itself a form of symbolic capital community based valuations of equity thus enable a more catholic approach to costs and benefits that broadens our knowledge both of equity and of development

risk constrained scheduling and offering strategies of a price maker hydro producer under uncertainty this paper presents a stochastic mixed integer linear programming smilp approach to maximize total expected profit of one price maker hydro producer in a pool based electricity market head dependence commitment decisions discharge ramping startup costs and forbidden zones are all effectively handled in our approach uncertainty about the competitors offers is adequately represented by residual demand curves rdcs scenarios the management of risk is suitably addressed by conditional value at risk cvar to provide the efficient frontier i e the solutions set for which the expected profit may not be augmented without enlarging the variance of profit appropriate offering strategies to the pool are also developed consisting of supply functions built for different risk levels a representative cascaded hydro system with 7 reservoirs is considered to analyze and compare risk neutral versus risk averse results

strategic bidding under uncertainty a binary expansion approach this work presents a binary expansion be solution approach to the problem of strategic bidding under uncertainty in short term electricity markets the be scheme is used to transform the products of variables in the nonlinear bidding problem into a mixed integer linear programming formulation which can be solved by commercially available computational systems the be scheme is applicable to pure price pure quantity or joint price quantity bidding models it is also possible to represent transmission networks uncertainties scenarios for price quantity plant availability and load financial instruments capacity reinforcement decisions and unit commitment the application of the methodology is illustrated in case studies with configurations derived from the 80 gw brazilian system

price maker self scheduling in a pool based electricity market a mixed integer lp approach this paper addresses the self scheduling problem faced by a price maker to achieve maximum profit in a pool based electricity market an exact and computationally efficient mixed integer linear programming milp formulation of this problem is presented this formulation models precisely the price maker capability of altering market clearing prices to its own benefits through price quota curves no assumptions are made on the characteristics of the pool and its agents a realistic case study is presented and the results obtained are analyzed in detail

third degree price discrimination in input markets output and welfare if price discrimination is realized the economy shifts from one equilibrium to another it clearly involves welfare effects the price discriminator clearly gains some consumers may also gain from the price cut but others may lose faced with higher prices etc traditionally the change in social welfare is known to be closely related to the change in total output in the case of third degree price discrimination it is well known that an increase in total output is a necessary condition for welfare improvement richard schmalensee 1981 proves this fact in a model in which the monopolist with constant marginal cost can perfectly separate markets further hal r varian 1985 extends this result to the case of interdependent markets permnitting increasing marginal cost of the monopolist and finally the assumption of nondecreasing marginal cost is eliminated by marius schwartz 1990 roughly speaking this proposition says that if there is a welfare gain from price discrimination there has to be some gain to offset the distortion involved on the other hand the vast majority of legal and other policy disputes over the price discrimination concern input markets not final good markets thus it seems important to investigate the situation in which a discriminating monopolist is not a final good supplier but an input supplier and the buyers of the input are downstream producers of a final good as is assumed in this paper if the downstream firms have different technologies their input demand functions will be different and thus the monopolist has an incentive to price discriminate in this scenario michael l katz 1987 and patrick degraba 1990 study the effect of inputmarket price discrimination and show that price discrimination always lowers welfare because it involves the distortion that a lower cost downstream firm is assigned a higher price unfortunately in their simple settings on the technology of downstream industry price discrimination can never change total output of the input or of the final good 1 thus we must say that welfare effect of input market price discrimination remains open to question if it has some effect on total output in particular we are curious as to whether we can obtain some close relationship between the changes in welfare and total output as we have obtained in the final good market settings with this motivation we will construct a model which involves change in total output of the final good in the next section the model and assumptions are provided in section ii after we extend the result of katz 1987 and degraba 1990 we find a relationship between the changes in welfare and total output strikingly it states that an increase in the total output of the final good is a sufficient condition for welfare deterioration this result contrasts with that obtained by schmalensee 1981 varian 1985 and schwartz 1990 from usual models of price discrimination in a final good market section iii concludes the analysis

in search of alternatives pro poor entrepreneurship in community forestry abstract community forestry is quite likely the most prominent form of development intervention in the present era it has gained momentum since the 1970s and now covers more than 25 per cent of the total forestlands globally however the introduction of commercialisation into community forestry controlled by private capital has not only undermined the livelihood requirements of poor people but also swiftly deteriorated forest conditions by unfolding the nature of commercialisation in community forestry in nepal this article argues that pro poor entrepreneurship models of producing forest resources through a partnership between poor people and community groups could be an appropriate alternative to develop economic opportunities and forest conservation

input market price discrimination and the choice of technology recent concerns over the effects of the robinson patman act and so called priceprotection policies such as most favoredcustomer clauses mfc s 2 on market performance have given economists new reasons to examine the welfare effects of third degree price discrimination in order to assess these effects correctly it is imperative that one understand how price discrimination influences market behavior joan robinson s 1933 work launched the formal inquiry into the welfare effects of third degree price discrimination building on the intuition presented by arthur pigou 1932 she showed that if a monopolist faces two independent linear demand curves the use of price discrimination will not affect industry output but will reduce welfare richard schmalensee 1981 extends these results to nonlinear demand curves and shows that an increase in total industry output is a necessary condition for price discrimination to be welfare improving hal varian 1985 broadens these results by deriving upper and lower bounds on the welfare change due to the use of price discrimination he shows that these results can be applied to markets in which there are nonzero cross price effects all of this work examines how the ability of a monopolist to price discriminate will affect the market outcome when all other characteristics of the market are treated as exogenous recently two lines of research have extended this inquiry beyond the case of a monopolist in a market with exogenously fixed parameters the first line considers the case of oligopoly the work of charles holt and david scheffman 1985 and thomas cooper 1986 has shown that restrictions on price discrimination imposed by the use of mfc s can facilitate collusion between oligopolists attempting to restrict output this implies that third degree price discrimination can be welfare improving the second line of research shows that price discrimination by a firm can affect nonprice decisions made by other market participants thus affecting the market outcome michael katz 1987 presents a model in which a large firm s ability to vertically integrate backward into the production of an input allows it to obtain a lower per unit price from the supplier of the input than can be obtained by smaller firms without this ability he shows that third degree price discrimination reduces welfare unless it prevents inefficient backward integration degraba 1987 shows that the use or nonuse of price discrimination by a national firm can affect nonprice decisions made by local firms that compete with the national firm in this situation third degree price discrimination is welfare reducing because it induces local firms to produce a product that is overly differentiated from the product of the national firm in all of the work cited above price discrimination is important when sellers set prices in separate markets or charge different prices to different customers in the same market the following analysis which can be considered a contribution to the second line of research suggests that price discrimination can be important even when a seller faces a single market in which all customers are identical the intuition behind this result is that nonprice decisions made by downstream producers such as the choice of technology can be affected by the use or johnson graduate school of management cornell university ithaca ny 14853 i thank robert frank robert smiley richard thaler and the participants of the jgsm applied microeconomics workshop for their helpful comments see william baldwin 1987 pp 438 40 for a good summary of the debate 2see john kwoka and lawrence white 1989 pp 196 7

market power assessment and mitigation in hydrothermal systems the objective of this paper is to investigate market power issues in bid based hydrothermal scheduling initially market power is simulated with a single stage nash cournot equilibrium model market power assessment for multiple stages is then carried through a stochastic dynamic programming scheme the decision in each stage and state is the equilibrium of a multi agent game thereafter mitigation measures specially bilateral contracts are investigated case studies with data taken from the brazilian system are presented and discussed

multimarket optimal bidding for a power producer this paper considers a profit maximizing thermal producer that participates in a sequence of spot markets namely day ahead automatic generation control agc and balancing markets the producer behaves as a price taker in both the day ahead market and the agc market but as a potential price maker in the volatile balancing market the paper provides a stochastic programming methodology to determine the optimal bidding strategies for the day ahead market uncertainty sources include prices for the day ahead and agc markets and balancing market linear price variations with the production of the thermal producer results from a realistic case study are reported and analyzed conclusions are duly drawn

a simulation model for a competitive generation market the simulation of a wholesale electricity market should go beyond a simple optimization based on the operating costs of the generating units a model of a competitive electricity market must consider the market structure the strategy of the market participants and any other factor that lead to prices different from costs this paper presents cosmee a model of a wholesale electricity market based on simple bids that estimates expected bid prices and quantities system hourly prices and generation schedules taking into account the bidding strategies of generators and the structure of the market the model reflects the profit maximizing behavior of the market agents subject to different types of constraints cosmee has been used to simulate a real wholesale market

optimal coordinated wind hydro bidding strategies in day ahead markets wind and hydro technologies represent an important part of the electricity generation sector however there have been few detailed studies that have investigated the synergies resulting from their combined operation to address that we formulate three optimization models where wind and reversible hydro technologies bid in a day ahead market the bidding strategies are divided into three categories 1 separate wind and reversible hydro offers without a physical connection between them 2 separate wind and reversible hydro offers with a physical connection to store by pumping the wind energy surplus and 3 single wind and reversible hydro offers with a physical connection risk is considered in the models by means of the conditional value at risk cvar a comparison of the models and relevant conclusions are drawn from an illustrative case study of the iberian day ahead electricity market