sequential labor decisions under uncertainty an estimable household model of west african farmers this paper reports estimates of the structural parameters of a stochastic control model that describcs the labor decisions of small farmers in burkina faso west africa the focus of the estimation is on measuring flexibility in production and intertemporal substitutability in consumption full information maximum likelihood estimates of the primitive parameters of the model are computed even though optimal labor decision rules cannot be derived analytically vuong s non nested model specification test shows that this method yields parameter estimates that are superior to those derived by assuming that farmers solve a deterministic control problem the low levels of agricultural labor effort commonly observed in the survey area are shown to be a consequence both of the low productivity of labor in archaic rainfed agriculture and of farmers awareness that in the absence of a labor market overly ambitious production plans lead to seasonal manpower constraints to meet rainfed farmers concerns agricultural research institutes and extension services should factor flexibility into their research agendas

learning about a new technology pineapple in ghana this paper investigates the role of social learning in the diffusion of a new agri cultural technology in ghana we use unique data on farmers communication patterns to define each individual s information neighborhood conditional on many potentially confounding variables we find evidence that farmers adjust their inputs to align with those of their information neighbors who were surpris ingly successful in previous periods the relationship of these input adjustments to experience further indicates the presence of social learning in addition applying the same method to input choices for another crop of known technol ogy correctly indicates an absence of social learning effects jel d83 013 033 q16

transition to fully funded pension schemes a non orthodox criticism summary the paper examines the dominant views on the adoption of mandatory fully funded pension schemes ff as a partial or complete substitute for the unfunded payg three obstacles to the ff reform are envisaged to begin with the reform may fail to boost workers marginal propensity to save since workers may contract their voluntary saving to compensate the larger mandatory saving to ff schemes secondly if payg s payroll contributions are reduced and diverted to a ff scheme the larger private saving supply will be balanced by a lower government saving if the government is committed to honour the current pension payments thirdly keynes saving paradox reinforced by the capital theory critique initiated by sraffa suggests that the effect of the rise in the marginal propensity to save is not an increase in capital accumulation but rather a fall of income and employment

purchase bidding strategy for a retailer with flexible demands in day ahead electricity market the paper aims to determine the day ahead market bidding strategies for retailers with flexible demands to maximize the short term profit it proposes a short term planning framework to forecast the load under dynamic tariffs and construct biding curves stochastic programming is applied to manage the uncertainties of spot price regulating price consumption behaviors and responsiveness to dynamic tariffs a case study based on data from sweden is carried out it demonstrates that a real time selling price can affect the aggregate load of a residential consumer group and lead to load shift toward low price periods the optimal bidding curves for specific trading periods are illustrated through comparing the bidding strategies under different risk factors the case study shows that a risk averse retailer tends to adopt the strategies with larger imbalances the benefit lies in the reduction of low profit risk however the aversion to risk can only be kept in a certain level a larger imbalance may lead to a quick reduction of profit in all scenarios

social networks and technology adoption in northern mozambique despite their potentially strong impact on poverty agricultural innovations are often adopted slowly using a unique household dataset on sunflower adoption in mozambique we analyse whether and how individual adoption decisions depend upon the choices of others in the same social networks since farmers anticipate that they will share information with others we expect farmers to be more likely to adopt when they know many other adopters dynamic considerations however suggest that farmers who know many adopters might strategically delay adoption to free ride on the information gathered by others we present empirical evidence that shows that the relationship between the probability of adoption and the number of known adopters is shaped as an inverse u in line with information sharing the network effect is stronger for farmers who report discussing agriculture with others the data contains information which is needed to ameliorate the identification issues that commonly arise in this context in particular social networks are precisely identified and in addition we can control for village heterogeneity and endogenous group formation

information and subsidies complements or substitutes abstract does providing information about a product influence the impact of price subsidies on purchases this question is particularly relevant for health products in developing countries where both informational campaigns and price subsidies are common policy instruments we conduct a field experiment in zambia and find that providing information about a new version of a product significantly increases the impact of price subsidies on take up taken alone the information manipulation has no significant impact on demand while the price subsidy substantially increases demand however the evaluation of either intervention in isolation fails to capture the significant complementarity between the two

using an economic experiment to estimate willingness to pay for a new maternal nutrient supplement in ghana scaling up access to supplements designed to prevent undernutrition such as new small quantity lipid based nutrient supplements sq lns may require distribution via both public channels and retail markets the viability of sq lns retail markets will hinge on household level demand we use an economic experiment to characterize initial willingness to pay wtp for a maternal sq lns product in ghana wtp is positive for most participants though below the estimated cost of production for many wtp varies depending on income assets and parity status these findings have implications for the design of public health policy and hybrid public private delivery mechanisms

a three level static milp model for generation and transmission expansion planning we present a three level equilibrium model for the expansion of an electric network the lower level model represents the equilibrium of a pool based market the intermediate level represents the nash equilibrium in generation capacity expansion taking into account the outcomes on the spot market and the upper level model represents the anticipation of transmission expansion planning to the investment in generation capacity and the pool based market equilibrium the demand has been considered as exogenous and locational marginal prices are obtained as endogenous variables of the model the three level model is formulated as a mixed integer linear programming milp problem the model is applied to a realistic power system in chile to illustrate the methodology and proper conclusions are reached

numerical solutions to nash cournot equilibria in coupled constraint electricity markets a numerical method based on a relaxation algorithm and the nikaido isoda function is presented for the calculation of nash cournot equilibria in electricity markets nash equilibrium is attained through a relaxation procedure applied to an objective function the nikaido isoda function which is derived from the existing profit maximization functions calculated by the generating companies we also show how to use the relaxation algorithm to compute and enforce a coupled constraint equilibrium which occurs if regulatory generation and distribution and more restrictions are placed on the companies and entire markets moreover we use the relaxation algorithm to compute players payoffs under several player configurations this is needed for the solution of our game under cooperative game theory concepts such as the bilateral shapley value and the kernel we show that the existence of both depends critically on demand price elasticity the numerical method converges to a unique solution under rather specific but plausible concavity conditions a case study from the ieee 30 bus system and a three bus bilateral market example with a dc model of the transmission line constraints are presented and discussed

health and agricultural productivity evidence from zambia we evaluate the productivity effects of investment in preventive health technology through a randomized controlled trial in rural zambia in the experiment access to subsidized bed nets was randomly assigned at the community level 516 farmers were followed over a one year farming period we find large positive effects of preventative health investment on productivity among farmers provided with access to free nets harvest value increased by us 76 corresponding to about 14 7 of the average output value while only limited information was collected on farming inputs shifts in the extensive and the intensive margins of labor supply appear to be the most likely mechanism underlying the productivity improvements observed

optimal bidding strategy of a plug in electric vehicle aggregator in day ahead electricity markets under uncertainty with a large scale introduction of plug in electric vehicles pevs a new entity the pev fleet aggregator is expected to be responsible for managing the charging of and for purchasing electricity for the vehicles we approach the problem of an aggregator bidding into the day ahead electricity market with the objective of minimizing charging costs while satisfying the pevs flexible demand the aggregator places demand bids only no vehicle to grid is considered the aggregator is assumed to potentially influence market prices in contrast to what is commonly found in the literature specifically the bidding strategy of the aggregator is formulated as a bilevel problem which is implemented as a mixed integer linear program the upper level problem represents the charging cost minimization of the aggregator whereas the lower level problem represents the market clearing since the bids of other market participants are not known to the aggregator ex ante a simple strategy is used to estimate them based on historical data an aggregated representation of the pev end use requirements as a virtual battery with time varying power and energy constraints is proposed derived from individual driving patterns since driving patterns cannot be perfectly forecasted we introduce a probabilistic virtual battery model we compare the results of the proposed bidding strategy with those of a bidding strategy assuming exogenous prices uncontrolled charging and a central dispatch of the fleet we also explore the impacts of different sources of uncertainty results show that with the proposed bidding strategy costs are significantly lower than under inflexible charging and are lower than assuming exogenous prices moreover the approach also performs well under uncertainty results also suggest that the aggregator only has limited market power potential at moderate pev penetrations

price maker bidding in day ahead electricity market for a retailer with flexible demands this study develops a short term planning model to determine the bidding curves on a day ahead market for a price maker retailer with flexible power demand it concerns the interactions between the spot price and the flexible demand both conditional value at risk and volume deviation risk are taken into account a numerical study using the data from the nordic electricity market is performed to investigate the influence of risk factors on the retailer s profit risk levels average spot price and total consumption three types of price elasticity are compared to show that the retailer can benefit from the flexibility in demand side in some cases the flexibility also leads to lower spot prices so that the customers in real time price based demand response can face a lower electricity price for per unit power consumption

high and declining prices signal product quality high and declining prices signal a high quality product high prices are the efficient means of signaling because the consequent loss of sales volume is most damaging for lower cost lower quality products as time passes and the number of informed consumers increases the signaling distortion lessens resulting in a declining price profile the prediction of high and declining prices is robust across a variety of dynamic models and is consistent with recent empirical findings copyright 1991 by american economic association

selective trials a principal agent approach to randomized controlled experiments we study the design of randomized controlled experiments when outcomes are significantly affected by experimental subjects unobserved effort expenditure while standard randomized controlled trials rcts are internally consistent the unobservability of effort compromises external validity we approach trial design as a principal agent problem and show that natural extensions of rcts which we call selective trials can help improve external validity in particular selective trials can disentangle the effects of treatment effort and the interaction of treatment and effort moreover they can help identify when treatment effects are affected by erroneous beliefs and inappropriate effort expenditure

impacts of network constraints on electricity market equilibrium nash equilibrium is usually used as the solution of generator s strategic bidding in electricity markets the available literature has shown by simulation that multiple market equilibria or no pure equilibrium may be induced after the inclusion of network constraints transmission constraints this paper presents a systematical analysis for the impacts of network constraints on the market equilibrium in oligopolistic electricity markets in our modeling the independent system operator iso dispatches generation and determines nodal prices via solving an optimal power flow opf and the individual generator optimizes its submitted supply function with nash supply function equilibrium sfe strategy after taking into account iso s decision making process on dispatched generations and nodal prices the conditions for the existence of equilibrium are given and it is shown that there may be multiple equilibria or no pure nash equilibrium the equilibrium if it exists will be at a point where generators pay no congestion charge

computation of extremal nash equilibria in a wholesale power market using a single stage milp this letter proposes a new approach to the computation of extremal nash equilibria in a wholesale power market with transmission constraints the approach uses linearization techniques to formulate the extremal nash equilibrium problem as a single stage mixed integer linear programming problem which can be solved with standard software through the introduced concept of extremal nash equilibria the derived structure can efficiently locate all nash equilibria of the game we show that this approach offers significant performance improvements over existing approaches to computing nash equilibria

modified benders decomposition for solving transmission investment game with risk measure this paper proposes a mathematical model for transmission investment game where there are several transmission planners tps the model is developed assuming a simultaneous move game between tps each tp maximizes the total surplus producers consumers and transmission surplus minus the investment cost of its region given the investment decisions of rival tps the transmission investment risk is also considered using the probability of shortfall measure we assume one market operator who dispatches the generators in all tp s regions the risk constrained nash equilibria model is formulated as a mixed integer linear program milp to solve the proposed milp a solution algorithm is proposed that combines the standard branch and bound algorithm bb with a proposed modified benders decomposition algorithm mbd the proposed bb mbd algorithm is also parallelized to improve the computation performance to improve the coordination between tps a supporting budget mechanism is also mathematically modeled in the milp the numerical results are carried out using the 9 bus 3 area and the ieee three area rts 96 networks the computational performance of proposed bb mbd is compared with standard bb algorithm

what matters and what does not in households decision to invest in malaria prevention this paper examines the take up of a new malaria control device by rural households in kenya and tests whether the demand curve for the device varies with the framing of marketing messages and with the gender of the person targeted by the marketing previous research suggests that the demand for malaria prevention is highly price sensitive jessica cohen and dupas 2008 even though the private returns to preventing malaria are very large christian lengeler 2004 in the standard model of investment in human capital individuals invest in a health product if the expected benefits from the product outweigh its costs michael grossman 1972 in this framework the low take up observed at relatively moderate prices by cohen and dupas 2008 could be due to people underestimating the expected benefits of investing in prevention or due to people being credit constrained and unable to pay the cost up front it is also possible that the standard model does not apply because people have time inconsistent preferences or because they are uncertain about their own preferences and rely on external cues to resolve their own uncertainty when they need to make a decision an extensive literature in psychology and marketing suggests that decision making can be affected by frames or cues that do not add information about a product but can be effective at persuading individuals to invest in it for example in a recent field experiment in south africa marianne bertrand et al 2008 found what matters and what does not in households decision to invest in malaria prevention

dynamic pricing of new experience goods we develop a dynamic model of experience goods pricing with independent private valuations we show that the optimal paths of sales and prices can be described in terms of a simple dichotomy in a mass market prices are declining over time in a niche market the optimal prices are initially low followed by higher prices that extract surplus from the buyers with a high willingness to pay we consider extensions of the model to integrate elements of social rather than private learning and turnover among buyers

disease and development the effect of life expectancy on economic growth we exploit the major international health improvements from the 1940s to estimate the effect of life expectancy on economic performance we construct predicted mortality using preintervention mortality rates from various diseases and dates of global interventions predicted mortality has a large impact on changes in life expectancy starting in 1940 but no effect before 1940 using predicted mortality as an instrument we find that a 1 percent increase in life expectancy leads to a 1 7 2 percent increase in population life expectancy has a much smaller effect on total gdp however consequently there is no evidence that the large increase in life expectancy raised income per capita

keeping the doctor away experimental evidence on investment in preventative health products household investment in preventative health products in developing countries is typically low even though the returns to such products are high in this paper we experimentally estimate demand curves for health products and test whether 1 information about health risk 2 cash liquidity 3 peer effects and 4 intra household differences in preferences affect demand in our main experiment in kenya involving children s shoes critical for preventing hookworm infection price is by far the most important predictor of purchase providing liquidity and targeting women also increased demand information had no effect even though we find that genuine learning occurred we find no peer effects even though people discussed the product purchase decision extensively we find similar results for price and information in three smaller studies in guatemala india and uganda in experiments involving soap and multivitamins

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

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

can higher prices stimulate product use evidence from a field experiment in zambia the controversy over how much to charge for health products in the developing world rests in part on whether higher prices can increase use either by targeting distribution to high use households a screening effect or by stimulating use psychologically through a sunk cost effect we develop a methodology for separating these two effects we implement the methodology in a field experiment in zambia using door to door marketing of a home water purification solution we find evidence of economically important screening effects by contrast we find no consistent evidence of sunk cost effects jel c93 d12 i11 m31 o12

experimentation in markets we present a model of entry and exit with bayesian learning and price competition a new product of initially unknown quality is introduced in the market and purchases of the product yield information on its true quality we assume that the performance of the new product is publicly observable as agents learn from the experiments of others informational externalities arise we determine the markov perfect equilibrium prices and allocations in a single market the combination of the informational externalities among the buyers and the strategic pricing by the sellers results in excessive experimentation if the new product is launched in many distinct markets the path of sales converges to the efficient path in the limit as the number of markets grows in multi agent learning situations informational externalities may reduce the number of experiments undertaken below the socially efficient level as buyers choose among new experience goods or firms decide whether to adopt a new technology the availability of information from others decisions gives rise to a free rider problem rather than perform a costly experiment herself a buyer may opt to wait and see how the market evaluates the new product in this paper we develop a simple market model of experimentation and analyse the informational effects in a model with buyers and sellers in contrast to the one sided experimentation problems we find that equilibrium experimentation often exceeds the pareto optimal level in two sided models the first model we consider is a dynamic duopoly in continuous time with homogeneous buyers two firms with differentiated products engage in price competition over time one product has a known value while the other is new and its true value is initially uncertain to all the parties in the model the value of the product is determined by the quality of the match between consumer preferences and product characteristics additional information is acquired only through repeat purchases in each period buyers observe a noisy signal of the true value of the product we assume that all signals are publicly observable and that all uncertainty is about a common value component with this assumption all buyers and sellers condition their behaviour on the same information and we can abstract from individual differences in past observations this is justified in economic situations where public data on other buyers choices is available and informative for example when choosing among providers of communication or transportation services such as mail delivery firms or airlines it is reasonable to rely on consumer reports and other published data in addition to one s private experience we also show that our model has an alternative interpretation as one where a flow of buyers make a once and

do non monetary prices target the poor evidence from a field experiment in india monetary price subsidies are often used to increase take up of health products but monetary prices may screen out those with the highest returns the poor using willingness to pay wtp data from a field experiment in india this paper determines whether nonmonetary prices better target health products to the poor than monetary prices it is found that monetary wtp is increasing in income and nonmonetary wtp is weakly decreasing in income comparing across price types nonmonetary wtp falls relative to monetary wtp as income rises nonmonetary prices better target the poor than monetary prices a larger fraction of total demand is poor

private health investments under competing risks evidence from malaria control in senegal this study exploits the introduction of high subsidies for anti malaria products in senegal in 2009 to investigate if malaria prevents parents to invest in child health building upon the seminal paper of dow et al 1999 we develop a simple model of health investments under competing mortality risks in which people allocate expenses to equalize lifetime across all causes of death we predict that private health investments to fight malaria as well as other diseases should increase in response to anti malaria public interventions to test this prediction we use original panel data from a senegalese household survey combined with geographical information on malaria prevalence our strategy is to compare the evolution of child health expenditures before and after anti malaria interventions between malarious and non malarious regions of senegal we find that health expenditures in malarious regions catch up with non malarious regions at the extensive and intensive margins and both in level and in composition the same result holds for parental health seeking behavior in case of other diseases like diarrhea we provide evidence that these patterns cannot be explained by differential trends in total income or access to healthcare or child morbidity between malarious and non malarious regions our results suggest that behavioral responses to anti malaria campaigns magnify their impact on all cause mortality for children

capacity expansion equilibria in liberalized electricity markets an epec approach this paper presents a novel way to model the generation capacity expansion problem in a liberalized framework via a multi year bilevel equilibrium model in the upper level the competing generation companies maximize their individual profits while the lower level represents the market using a conjectured price response approach which allows us to vary the strategic spot market behavior to see how much the reigning competitive behavior impacts investment decisions the bilevel equilibrium model is formulated as an equilibrium problem with equilibrium constraints transformed into a mixed integer linear program and solved as such using diagonalization in order to verify equilibria we present a case study to apply this new modeling approach and to demonstrate that the proposed equilibrium problem with equilibrium constraints can have multiple solutions whose respective investments can vary

alcohol and self control a field experiment in india this paper studies alcohol consumption among low income workers in india in a 3 week field experiment the majority of 229 cycle rickshaw drivers were willing to forgo substantial monetary payments in order to set incentives for themselves to remain sober thus exhibiting demand for commitment to sobriety randomly receiving sobriety incentives significantly reduced daytime drinking while leaving overall drinking unchanged i find no evidence of higher daytime sobriety significantly changing labor supply productivity or earnings in contrast increasing sobriety raised savings by 50 percent an effect that does not appear to be solely explained by changes in income net of alcohol expenditures

taxes and growth in a financially underdeveloped country evidence from the chilean investment boom this paper argues that taxation of retained profits is particularly distortionary in an economy with good growth prospects and poorly developed financial markets because it primarily reduces the investment of financially constrained firms investment that has marginal product greater than the after tax market real interest rate contrarily taxes on distributed profits or capital gains primarily reduce the investment of financially unconstrained firms chile experienced a banking crisis over the period from 1982 to 1986 and in 1984 reduced its tax rate on retained profits from 50 percent to 10 percent we show that consistent with our theory there was a large increase in aggregate investment after the reform which was entirely funded by an increase in retained profits further we show that investment grew by more in industries that depend more on external financing according to the rajan and zingales 1998 measure finally we present some weak evidence from comparisons of investment rates across firms for several different measures of their likelihood of being financially constrained

governance and the effectiveness of public health subsidies evidence from ghana kenya and uganda abstract distributing subsidized health products through existing health infrastructure could substantially and cost effectively improve health in sub saharan africa there is however widespread concern that poor governance in particular limited health worker accountability seriously undermines the effectiveness of subsidy programs we audit targeted bed net distribution programs to quantify the extent of agency problems we find that around 80 of the eligible receive the subsidy as intended and up to 15 of subsidies are leaked to ineligible people supplementing the program with simple financial or monitoring incentives for health workers does not improve performance further and is thus not cost effective in this context

generation flexibility in ramp rates strategic behavior and lessons for electricity market design abstract a ramp rate usually defines the speed at which an electric power producer can decrease or increase its production in limited time the availability of fast ramping generators significantly affects the economic dispatch especially in the systems with high penetration of intermittent energy sources e g wind power since the fluctuations in supply are common and sometimes unpredictable one of the regulatory practices of how to impel generators to provide their true ramp rates is to separate the stages of submitting the bids on ramp rate and production in this paper we distinguish two types of market structures one stage when electric power producers are deciding their production and ramp rate at the same time or two stage when generators decide their ramp rate first and choose their production levels at the second stage we employ one stage and two stage equilibrium models respectively to represent these market setups and use a conjectured price response parameter ranging from perfect competition to the cournot oligopoly to investigate the effect of the market competition structure on the strategic decisions of the generators we compare these two market setups in a symmetric duopoly case with two time periods and prove that in the two stage market setup the level of ramp rate is independent of the strategic behavior in the spot market and generally lower than the one offered in the one stage setup we also show that the ramp rate levels in one and two stage models coincide at the cournot oligopoly we extend the model to asymmetry several load periods portfolio bidding and uncertainty and show that withholding the ramp rate still occurs in both models our findings prove that market regulators cannot rely on only separating the decision stages as an effective measure to mitigate market power and in certain cases it may lead to an adverse effect

the illusion of sustainability this brief summarizes the results of a gender impact evaluation study entitled the illusion of sustainability conducted during the time period 1998 to 2001 in kenya the study observed that deworming is a public good since much of its social benefit comes through reduced disease transmission people were less likely to take deworming if their direct first order or indirect second order social contacts were exposed to deworming the introduction of a small fee for deworming drugs led to an 80 percent reduction in treatment rates take up was not sensitive to the exact price level suggesting that it is particularly counter productive to charge small positive prices for the treatment of infectious diseases an intensive school health education had no impact on worm prevention funding for the study derived from world bank nih fogarty international center berkeley center for health research

microeconomic approaches to development schooling learning and growth within the field of economic development over the past 15 years or so particularly significant advances have been made in what can be loosely called micro development an area defined principally by the units that are examined not by a particular methodological approach the units may be indi viduals households networks banks government agencies and so on as opposed to countries within this area economists use a wide variety of empirical methods informed to different degrees by economic models they use data from developed and

tiered co payments pricing and demand in reference price markets for pharmaceuticals health insurance companies curb price insensitive behavior and the moral hazard of insureds by means of cost sharing such as tiered co payments or reference pricing in drug markets this paper evaluates the effect of price limits below which drugs are exempt from co payments on prices and on demand first using a difference in differences estimation strategy we find that the new policy decreases prices by 5 percent for generics and increases prices by 4 percent for brand name drugs in the german reference price market second estimating a nested logit demand model we show that consumers appreciate co payment exempt drugs and calculate lower price elasticities for brand name drugs than for generics this explains the different price responses of brand name and generic drugs and shows that price related co payment tiers are an effective tool to steer demand to low priced drugs

modeling real time balancing power market prices using combined sarima and markov processes this paper describes modeling of real time balancing power market prices by using combined seasonal auto regressive integrated moving average sarima and discrete markov processes the combination of such processes allows generation of price series with periods where no demand for balancing power exists the purpose of the model is simulation of prices to construct scenario trees representing possible realization of the stochastic prices such scenario trees can be used in planning models based on stochastic optimization to generate bid sequences to the balancing market the spread of the prices in the tree and the shape of the scenarios are of central importance model parameter estimation methods reflecting the demands on scenario trees have therefore been used the proposed model is also applied to data from the nordic power market the conclusion of this paper is that the developed model is appropriate for modeling real time balancing power prices

assessing market structures in resource markets an empirical analysis of the market for metallurgical coal using various equilibrium models abstract the prevalent market structures found in many resource markets consist of high concentration on the supply side and low demand elasticity market results are therefore frequently assumed to be an outcome of strategic interaction between producers common models to investigate the market outcomes and underlying market structures are games representing competitive markets strategic cournot competition and stackelberg structures that take into account a dominant player acting first followed by one or more players we add to the literature by expanding the application of mathematical models and applying an equilibrium problem with equilibrium constraints epec which is used to model multi leader follower games to a spatial market using our model we investigate the prevalent market setting in the international market for metallurgical coal between 2008 and 2010 whose market characteristics provide arguments for a wide variety of market structures using different statistical measures to compare model results with actual market outcomes we find that two previously neglected settings perform best first a setting in which the four largest metallurgical coal exporting firms compete against each other as stackelberg leaders while the remainders act as cournot followers second a setting with bhpb acting as sole stackelberg leader

retailers risk management and vertical arrangements in electricity markets the failure of the asset light retailer s organizational model is indicative of the incapacity of this organizational structure to manage efficiently the combination of sourcing and market risks in the current market environment because of the structural dimensions of electricity s market risks a retailer s level of risk exposure is unknown ex ante and will only be revealed ex post when consumption is known in contrast to the textbook model of electricity reforms the paper demonstrates through numerical simulations that in the current market context pure portfolios of contracts are incomplete risk management instruments compared to physical hedging the latter is critical to overcome the asset light retailer s curse

introducing a demand based electricity distribution tariff in the residential sector demand response and customer perception increased demand response is essential to fully exploit the swedish power system which in turn is an absolute prerequisite for meeting political goals related to energy efficiency and climate chan

the use of knowledge about society abstract selection of efficient institutions or policies in politics requires constituents to estimate the net benefits of political reforms political competition fails to inform constituents of the costs of forgone political alternatives ignorance of political opportunity costs prevents the adoption of welfare enhancing reforms of public institutions and policies the empirical record supports this contention

investigating the ability of demand shifting to mitigate electricity producers market power previous work on the role of the demand side in imperfect electricity markets has demonstrated that its self price elasticity reduces electricity producers ability to exercise market power however the concept of self price elasticity cannot accurately capture consumers flexibility as the latter mainly involves shifting of loads operation in time this paper provides for the first time theoretical and quantitative analysis of the beneficial impact of demand shifting ds in mitigating market power by the generation side quantitative analysis is supported by a multiperiod equilibrium programming model of the imperfect electricity market accounting for the time coupling operational constraints of ds as well as network constraints the decision making process of each strategic producer is modeled through a bi level optimization problem which is solved after converting it to a mathematical program with equilibrium constraints mpec and linearizing the latter through suitable techniques the oligopolistic market equilibria resulting from the interaction of multiple independent producers are determined by employing an iterative diagonalization method case studies on a test market reflecting the general generation and demand characteristics of the gb system quantitatively demonstrate the benefits of ds in mitigating producers market power by employing relevant indexes from the literature

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

household composition labor markets and labor demand testing for separation in agricultural household models this paper tests the separation of farm labor supply and labor demand decisions using the observation that household composition is an important determinant of farm labor use with nonseparation after assessing the conditions under which the test has power against several alternatives an empirical model is developed to test the proposition that farm employment is independent of family composition the model is estimated on a data set from rural java the null hypothesis that farm labor allocation decisions are independent of household structure is not rejected the results are robust to different specifications of the labor demand function copyright 1992 by the econometric society

seeing is believing evidence from an extension network experiment extension is designed to enable lab to farm technology diffusion decentralized models assume that information flows from researchers to extension workers and from extension agents to contact farmers cfs cfs should then train other farmers in their communities such a modality may fail to address informational inefficiencies and accountability issues the authors run a field experiment to measure the impact of augmenting the cf model with a direct cf training on the diffusion of a new technology all villages have cfs and access the same extension network in treatment villages cfs additionally receive a three day central training on the new technology they track information transmission through two nodes of the extension network from extension agents to cfs and from cfs to other farmers directly training cfs leads to a large statistically significant increase in adoption among cfs however higher levels of cf adoption have limited impact on the behavior of other farmers

micro loans insecticide treated bednets and malaria evidence from a randomized controlled trial in orissa india we describe findings from the first large scale cluster randomized controlled trial in a developing country that evaluates the uptake of a health protecting technology insecticide treated bednets itns through micro consumer loans as compared to free distribution and control conditions despite a relatively high price 52 percent of sample households purchased itns highlighting the role of liquidity constraints in explaining earlier low adoption rates we find mixed evidence of improvements in malaria indices we interpret the results and their implications within the debate about cost sharing sustainability and liquidity constraints in public health initiatives in developing countries

loyalty exit and enforcement evidence from a kenya dairy cooperative organizations depend on members loyalty for their success studying a cooperative s attempt to increase deliveries by members we show that the threat of sanctions leads to highly heterogeneous response among members despite the cooperative not actually enforcing the threatened sanctions positive effects for some members persist for several months other members exit stopping delivering altogether among non compliant members we document substantial heterogeneity in beliefs about the legitimacy of the sanctions this lack of common understanding highlights the role played by managers in organizations and provides a candidate explanation for lack of sanctions enforcement documented by ostrom 1990 and other studies

what accounts for the chilean saving miracle this paper examines the recent saving performance of the chilean economy in the light of its long run 1940 96 trends the first conclusion that can be derived from the data is that most of the increase in private saving since the mid 1980s is due to business saving household saving turns out to be a stationary variable with zero mean since business saving has a unit root households do not seem to take the saving of firms into account when making their own saving decisions within the theoretical framework of a model of business investment with liquidity constraints we estimate a var for business saving private investment public saving and foreign saving the current account deficit we are able to determine that business saving is unaffected by public saving but that in the long run foreign saving and business saving are perfect substitutes private investment business saving and foreign saving are jointly determined the policy conclusions are that policies that stimulate investment are likely to lead to an increase in private saving that policies aimed at raising household saving will be ineffective and that increases in public saving are very powerful for increasing domestic saving in the long run copyright 2001 by oxford university press

demand for environmental quality information and household response evidence from well water arsenic testing access to information about environmental quality may facilitate low cost preventive measures that protect human health in this paper we study the demand for information about environmental quality and the behavioral response to the information provided with a field experiment conducted in bihar india we estimate the price sensitivity of demand for diagnostic testing of drinking water wells for arsenic of natural origin a serious threat to the health of tens of millions of villagers across south and southeast asia demand is substantial but sensitive to price uptake falls from 68 to 31 of households over our price range rs 10 to rs 50 we further assess how households respond to information regarding the contamination level in their wells about one third of households with unsafe wells switch to a safer water source finally we demonstrate that households that received adverse test outcomes are more likely to selectively forget test results and proactively remove evidence of their wells arsenic status

health nutrition and economic development the relationship between health and economic development is explored focusing on nutrition based health indicators the spotlight is placed on the inter related feedbacks between the influence of health on productivity on one hand and the influence of income on health status on the other disentangling causality in these relationships has preoccupied much of the literature we evaluate different empirical strategies that have been adopted and assess the results there is now a body of evidence based on careful empirical studies that demonstrates a causal relationship between health and labor productivity there is also evidence that at least among the very poor additional income is spent on improved nutrition there are two issues that have received little attention although we argue they are likely to be very important first measurement of health is discussed in detail evidence is presented on how taking into account differences in the extent of measurement error is critical for interpreting the impact of health on wages the same theme emerges in studies of the effect of income on health specifically calorie intake the key role of non linearities in these relationships is highlighted and we demonstrate that a good deal of the variation in estimates of income elasticities of demand for calories can be ascribed to the role of measurement and functional form authors

price subsidies diagnostic tests and targeting of malaria treatment evidence from a randomized controlled trial author s dupas pascaline cohen jessica schaner simone abstract both under and over treatment of communicable diseases are public bads but efforts to decrease one run the risk of increasing the other using rich experimental data on household treatment seeking behavior in kenya we study the implications of this tradeoff for subsidizing life saving antimalarials sold over the counter at retail drug outlets we show that a very high subsidy such as the one under consideration by the international community dramatically increases access but nearly half of subsidized pills go to patients without malaria we study two ways to better target subsidized drugs reducing the subsidy level and introducing rapid malaria tests over the counter

understanding domestic savings an empirical approach abstractthere are two unusual and important features in the evolution of the savings rate in chile first the economy increased the average savings rate by 11 percentage points in the period 1985

strategic offering and equilibrium in coupled gas and electricity markets the wide integration of gas fired units and implementation of power to gas technologies bring increasing interdependence among the natural gas and electricity infrastructures this paper studies the equilibrium of the coupled gas and electricity markets which is driven by the strategic offering behaviors each producer endeavours to maximize its own profit by taking the market clearing process into consideration the market equilibrium can be obtained from an equilibrium problem with equilibrium constraints a special diagonalization algorithm is devised in which the unilateral equilibrium of the gas or electricity market is found in the inner loop given the rivals strategies the interactions of the two markets are tackled in the outer loop case studies on two test systems validate the proposed methodology

free distribution or cost sharing evidence from a randomized malaria prevention experiment author s cohen jessica dupas pascaline abstract it is often argued that cost sharing charging a subsidized positive price for a health product is necessary to avoid wasting resources on those who will not use or do not need the product we explore this argument through a field experiment in kenya in which we randomized the price at which prenatal clinics could sell long lasting anti malarial insecticide treated nets itns to pregnant women we find no evidence that costsharing reduces wastage on those that will not use the product women who received free itns are not less likely to use them than those who paid subsidized positive prices we also find no evidence that costsharing induces selection of women who need the net more those who pay higher prices appear no sicker than the average prenatal client in the area in terms of measured anemia an important indicator of malaria cost sharing does however considerably dampen demand we find that uptake drops by 75 percent when the price of itns increases from zero to 0 75 i e from 100 to 87 5 percent subsidy the price at which itns are currently sold to pregnant women in kenya we combine our estimates in a cost effectiveness analysis of itn prices on child mortality that incorporates both private and social returns to itn usage overall our results suggest that free distribution of itns could save many more lives than cost sharing programs have achieved so far and given the large positive externality associated with widespread usage of itns it would likely do so at a lesser cost per life saved

equilibria in an oligopolistic electricity pool with stepwise offer curves we study the equilibria reached by strategic producers in a pool based network constrained electricity market the behavior of each producer is modeled by a mathematical program with equilibrium constraints mpec whose objective is maximizing profit and whose complementarity constraints describe market clearing the joint solution of all these mpecs constitutes an equilibrium problem with equilibrium constraints epec the equilibria associated with the epec are analyzed by solving the strong stationarity conditions of all mpecs which can be linearized without approximation by mixed integer linear programming milp techniques the resulting mixed integer linear conditions can be reformulated as an optimization problem that allows establishing diverse objectives to differentiate among alternative equilibria

short run subsidies and long run adoption of new health products evidence from a field experiment short run subsidies for health products are common in poor countries how do they affect long run adoption a common fear among development practitioners is that one off subsidies may negatively affect long run adoption through reference dependence people might anchor around the subsidized price and be unwilling to pay more for the product later but for experience goods one off subsidies could also boost long run adoption through learning this paper uses data from a two stage randomized pricing experiment in kenya to estimate the relative importance of these effects for a new improved antimalarial bed net reduced form estimates show that a one time subsidy has a positive impact on willingness to pay a year later inherit to separately identify the learning and anchoring effects we estimate a parsimonious experience good model estimation results show a large positive learning effect but no anchoring we black then discuss the types of products and the contexts inherit for which these results may apply

finding equilibria in the pool based electricity market with strategic wind power producers and network constraints this paper proposes a model to find the equilibria in the short term electricity market with large scale wind power penetration the behavior of each strategic player is modeled through a two stage mathematical problem with equilibrium constraints mpec where the upper level problem maximizes the profit of the strategic player and the lower level problem describes the clearing processes of the day ahead and real time markets while considering the network constraints the joint solution of all the mpecs constitutes an equilibrium problem with equilibrium constraints epec the uncertain wind power production and demand are represented by a set of plausible scenarios by using the duality theory and karush kuhn tucker condition each mpec is transferred into a mixed integer linear programing problem the nash equilibria of the electricity market are obtained by solving the epec using game theory and the diagonalization algorithm case studies are performed to show the effectiveness of the proposed model

identification of endogenous social effects the reflection problem this paper examines the reflection problem that arises when a researcher observing the distribution of behaviour in a population tries to infer whether the average behaviour in some group influences the behaviour of the individuals that comprise the group it is found that inference is not possible unless the researcher has prior information specifying the compisition of reference groups if this information is available the prospects for inference depend critically on the population relationship between the variables defining reference groups and those directly affecting outcomes inference is difficult to implossible if these variables are functionally dependent or are statistically independent the prospects are better if the variables defining reference groups and those directly affecting outcomes are moderately related in the population

credit market consequences of improved personal identification field experimental evidence from malawi we implemented a randomized field experiment in malawi examining borrower responses to being fingerprinted when applying for loans this intervention improved the lender s ability to implement dynamic repayment incentives allowing it to withhold future loans from past defaulters while rewarding good borrowers with better loan terms as predicted by a simple model fingerprinting led to substantially higher repayment rates for borrowers with the highest ex ante default risk but had no effect for the rest of the borrowers we provide unique evidence that this improvement in repayment rates is accompanied by behaviors consistent with less adverse selection and lower moral hazard jel d14 d82 g21 o12 o16

on the effectiveness of uniform subsidies in increasing market consumption we study the problem faced by a central planner trying to increase the consumption of a good such as new malaria drugs in africa the central planner allocates subsidies to its producers subject to a budget constraint and endogenous market response the policy most commonly implemented in practical applications of this problem is uniform in the sense that it allocates the same per unit subsidy to every firm primarily because of its simplicity and perceived fairness surprisingly we identify sufficient conditions of the firms marginal costs such that uniform subsidies are optimal even if the firms efficiency levels are arbitrarily different moreover this insight is usually preserved even if the central planner is uncertain about the specific market conditions further in many cases uniform subsidies simultaneously attain the best social welfare solution additionally simulation results in relevant settings where uniform subsidies are not optimal suggest that they induce a nearly optimal market

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

learning misallocation and technology adoption evidence from new malaria therapy in tanzania i study how the misallocation of new technology to individuals who have low ex post returns to its use affects learning and adoption behavior i focus on antimalarial treatment which is frequently over prescribed in many low income country contexts where diagnostic tests are inaccessible i show that misdiagnosis reduces average therapeutic effectiveness because only a fraction of adopters actually have malaria and slows the rate of social learning due to increased noise i use data on adoption choices the timing and duration of fever episodes and individual blood slide confirmations of malarial status from a pilot study for a new malaria therapy in tanzania to show that individuals whose reference groups experienced fewer misdiagnoses exhibited stronger learning effects and were more likely to adopt

one off subsidies and long run adoption experimental evidence on improved cooking stoves in senegal free technology distribution can be an effective development policy instrument if market driven adoption is socially inefficient and hampered by affordability constraints yet policy makers often oppose free distribution arguing that reference dependence lowers the willingness to pay wtp and thus market potentials in the long run for improved cookstoves this paper studies the wtp six years after a randomized one time free distribution in 2009 we demonstrate that the cookstoves were intensely used by the treatment group households in the years after randomization until they reached their designated lifetime using a real purchase offer we find that both treatment and control households reveal a remarkably high wtp in 2015 the estimated confidence interval suggests that we can exclude a substantial negative effect on the treatment group the policy implication is that one time free distribution does not necessarily undermine future market establishment and thus can be an effective policy instrument if rapid dissemination is the objective

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

estimating individual discount rates in denmark a field experiment we estimate individual discount rates with respect to time streams of money using controlled laboratory experiments these discount rates are elicited by means of field experiments involving real monetary rewards the experiments were carried out across denmark using a representative sample of 268 people between 19 and 75 years of age individual discount rates are estimated for various households differentiated by socio demographic characteristics such as income and age our conclusions are that discount rates are constant over the 12 month to 3 year horizons used in these experiments and that discount rates vary substantially with respect to several socio demographic variables hence we conclude that it would be reasonable to assume constant discount rates for specific household types but not the same rates across all households

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

coherent arbitrariness stable demand curves without stable preferences economic theories of valuation generally assume that prices of commodities and assets are derived from underlying fundamental values for example in finance theory asset prices are believed to reflect the market estimate of the discounted present value of the asset s payoff stream in labor theory the supply of labor is established by the tradeoff between the desire for consumption and the displeasure of work finally and most importantly for this chapter consumer microeconomics assumes that the demand curves for consumer products chocolates cds movies vacations drugs and so forth can be ultimately traced to the valuation of pleasures that consumers anticipate receiving from these products because it is difficult as a rule to measure fundamental values directly empirical tests of economic theory typically examine whether the effects of changes in circumstances on valuations are consistent with theoretical prediction for example whether labor supply responds appropriately to a change in the wage rate whether compensated demand curves for commodities are downward sloping or whether stock prices respond in the predicted way to share repurchases however such comparative static relationships are a necessary but not sufficient condition for fundamental valuation e g summers 1986 becker 1962 was perhaps the first to make this point explicitly when he observed that consumers choosing commodity bundles randomly from their budget set would nevertheless produce downward sloping demand curves

accounting for the effect of health on economic growth i use microeconomic estimates of the effect of health on individual outcomes to construct macroeconomic estimates of the proximate effect of health on gdp per capita i employ a variety of methods to construct estimates of the return to health which i combine with cross country and historical data on height adult survival rates and age at menarche using my preferred estimate eliminating health differences among countries would reduce the variance of log gdp per worker by 9 9 percent and reduce the ratio of gdp per worker at the 90th percentile to gdp per worker at the loth percentile from 20 5 to 17 9 while this effect is economically significant it is also substantially smaller than estimates of the effect of health on economic growth that are derived from cross country regressions

a robust linear approach for offering strategy of a hybrid electric energy company this paper presents a new approach for determining the day ahead bidding strategies of a large scale hybrid electric energy company the company has both energy generation and energy retailing businesses in a competitive electricity market demand response programs are also considered in the retail side of the company in order to hedge the risk of participation in wholesale market this paper introduces a max min bilevel mathematical programming with equilibrium constraint model for offering a strategy that manages the risk of uncertain forecasted rivals bids by robust optimization the max min bilevel model is converted to its equivalent single level optimization using karush kuhn tucker optimality conditions the duality theory is utilized to find the equivalent ordinary maximization model of the max min problem strong duality theory and big m method are also used to linearize the final model of offering strategy applicability of the proposed approach is shown by implementing it on the ieee 118 bus test system

mistake 37 the effect of previously encountered prices on current housing demand based on contrast effects studies from psychology we predicted that movers arriving from more expensive cities would rent pricier apartments than those arriving from cheaper cities we also predicted that as people stayed in their new city they would get used to the new prices and would readjust their housing expenditures countering the initial impact of previous prices we found support for both predictions in a sample of 928 movers from the psid alternative explanations based on unobserved wealth and taste and on imperfect information are ruled out

discussion of hydrothermal market simulator using game theory assessment of market power the game theoretic model of cournot competition among owners of both thermal generation and reservoir constrained hydro facilities in an electricity market is similar to the papers of scott and read 1 and bushnell 2 the work here 3 offers a slightly different solution approach and an interesting application to data representing the circumstances in the chilean market a comparison of the results of these other markets new zealand and western u s respectively would be useful to understand the implications of small modeling differences in particular the bushnell model exploits a formulation as a linear complementarity problem which provides well known numerical procedures and a framework for analyzing the uniqueness of solutions villar and rudnick here motivate the contrast with chile s existing cost based pool by considering the example of the california market design of 1998 to 2000 however the california model includes much more and much that is not relevant to the analysis here given the problems of the california design it might be tempting to dismiss this paper but this would be a mistake the model analyzed here would be applicable for the market design in chile with only the move to a bid based rather than an audited cost based coordinated spot market the paper simplifies the analytical problem in two prominent features first the model assumes away the effects of transmission networks and the associated transmission constraints second the model employs the cournot assumption although the authors assert that something like the supply function equilibrium model would be closer to the observed behavior in the from of bid functions hence the role of the analysis is topro vide insight in tothe nature o f the strategic interactions rather than provide conclusive estimates of the magnitude of the exercise of market power hence the real value is in the authors interpretations and explanations of the results the analysis of physical and financial contracts and their effects on market power is a familiar result both types of contracts reduce the incentive toexercise seller s market po wer in the spo t market a novel result here about the greater volatility of the financial contracts flows from a particular modeling assumption in this model there is exact performance on physical contracts and therefore no effects of a failure to perform on a contract in reality of course failure to perform is normal through over or underdelivery to some degree depending on the balancing rules and payments this could eliminate any analytical difference between the contract types

linear complementarity models of nash cournot competition in bilateral and poolco power markets two cournot models of imperfect competition among electricity producers are formulated as mixed linear complementarity problems lcps and a simple example is presented to illustrate their application the two models simulate bilateral markets the models include a congestion pricing scheme for transmission but other transmission pricing approaches can also be represented in this framework the two models differ from each other in that one has no arbitrage between nodes of the network while in the other model arbitragers erase any noncost based differences in price the latter bilateral model turns out to be equivalent to a cournot model of a poolco the models differ from other cournot market models in that they include both of kirchhoff s laws via a dc approximation can include arbitragers possess unique solutions and are readily solved by efficient lcp algorithms the key assumption that permits their formulation as lcps is that each producer naively assumes that its output will not affect transmission prices

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

finding multiple nash equilibria in pool based markets a stochastic epec approach we present a compact formulation to find all pure nash equilibria in a pool based electricity market with stochastic demands the equilibrium model is formulated as a stochastic equilibrium problem subject to equilibrium constraints epec the problem is based on a stackelberg game where the generating companies gencos optimize their strategic bids anticipating the solution of the independent system operator iso market clearing a finite strategy approach both in prices and quantities is applied to transform the nonlinear and nonconvex set of nash inequalities into a mixed integer linear problem milp a procedure to find all nash equilibria is developed by generating holes that are added as linear constraints to the feasibility region the result of the problem is the set of all pure nash equilibria and the market clearing prices and assigned energies by the iso a case study illustrates the methodology and proper conclusions are reached

if it pays it stays can agribusiness internalize the benefits of malaria control might a malaria control intervention entail agricultural effects that allow a commercial agribusiness to offset its costs the randomized allocation of 39 936 insecticide treated mosquito nets among 81 597 smallholder cotton farming households in 1 507 clusters helps evaluate this in the context of zambia s cotton outgrowing industry but despite large health impacts on treated households no impact on cotton deliveries to the agribusiness is detected with some caveats the results tend to strike a discord with recent evidence on the agricultural productivity effects of malaria control

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 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