the performance of pivotal voter models in small scale elections evidence from texas liquor referenda abstract this paper explores the ability of pivotal voter models to explain voter behavior in small scale elections using data from texas liquor referenda the findings provide little support for the view that pivotal voter models are a reasonable theory for understanding small scale elections interestingly this is not because they cannot explain the levels of turnout in the data but rather because they cannot explain the size of the winning margins the logic of pivotal voter models implies that elections must be expected to be close even if there is a significant difference between the sizes of the groups or the intensity of their preferences with even a relatively small number of eligible voters elections that are expected to be close ex ante must end up being close ex post however in the data winning margins are often significant

do parties matter estimating the effect of political power in multi party systems abstract when there are more than two parties policy outcomes are typically the result of a bargaining process we investigate whether changes in political power for various parties have an effect on tax policies we use an instrumental variable approach where close elections provide the exogenous variation in our variable of interest voting power in order to isolate close elections in a proportional election system we develop a new simulation algorithm using data from german municipalities in the state of bavaria our estimation results suggest that political power does matter for policies somewhat surprisingly the center left party spd is found to lower all three locally controlled taxes whereas the greens increase both property taxes considerably these results remain robust across a range of specifications our partisan effect for the spd is also confirmed by a simple regression discontinuity estimation using mayoral elections

coalitional game theory approach to modeling suppliers collaboration in supply networks abstract suppliers collaboration is a new paradigm to improve the utilization of collective intelligence in supply networks although existing literature advocates the notion of cooperation in supply networks there is a dearth of studies quantitatively analyzing cost and benefit of cooperation in this study we first develop a model for suppliers dynamic coalition formation using coalitional game theory the proposed cost structure influences the utility of each possible coalition and restricts the coalition size and search space for finding possible coalitions to distribute the profit earned by cooperation in a fair manner a criterion named shared capacity index is developed according to suppliers capacity share in the corresponding coalition a suppliers cooperation algorithm is then proposed to resolve possible conflicts among network members whereby each supplier is able to explore coalitional structures autonomously the efficiency of the proposed approach is evaluated through simulation studies and compared to other solution methods including shapley value and proportional fairness results demonstrate that long term cooperation among suppliers leads to enhanced average individual profit in the network

energy microfinance intervention for below poverty line households in india more than 72 of india s population resides in rural india1 and it also has a high concentration of people living under abject poverty of the total rural population 27 1 28 3 lives below the poverty line2 bpl a lack of energy finance options is hampering the quality of life of the bpl community the members of this disadvantaged household which forms 27 1 and 23 6 of the india s rural and urban population3 has no ready access to mainstream finance or know how of sustainable energy products nor do they have access to energy service providing agency this lack of energy finance options has provided the marginalized population little means to break the conventional energy paradigm and the corresponding poverty cycle considering the afore mentioned problem we propose an energy microfinance intervention or a model that encompasses two independent entities one has an energy expertise and the other possesses finance management skills alternately we also propose a special purpose entity that comprises of these two entities this entity fosters different institutional technical and financial engineering approaches to the provision of energy finance and infrastructure services necessary for poverty alleviation

farsighted coalitional stability abstract i define the largest consistent set a solution concept which applies to situations in which coalitions freely form but cannot make binding contracts act publicly and are fully farsighted in that a coalition considers the possibility that once it acts another coalition might react a third coalition might in turn react and so on without limit i establish weak nonemptiness conditions and apply it to strategic and coalitional form games and majority rule voting i argue that it improves on the von neumann morgenstern stable set as it is usually defined but is consistent with a generalization of the stable set as in the theory of social situations journal of economic literature classification numbers c70 c71

modern energy access to all in rural india an integrated implementation strategy abstract expanding energy access to the rural population of india presents a critical challenge for its government the presence of 364 million people without access to electricity and 726 million who rely on biomass for cooking indicate both the failure of past policies and programs and the need for a radical redesign of the current system we propose an integrated implementation framework with recommendations for adopting business principles with innovative institutional regulatory financing and delivery mechanisms the framework entails establishment of rural energy access authorities and energy access funds both at the national and regional levels to be empowered with enabling regulatory policies capital resources and the support of multi stakeholder partnership these institutions are expected to design lead manage and monitor the rural energy interventions at the other end trained entrepreneurs would be expected to establish bioenergy based micro enterprises that will produce and distribute energy carriers to rural households at an affordable cost the escos will function as intermediaries between these enterprises and the international carbon market both in aggregating carbon credits and in trading them under cdm if implemented such a program could address the challenges of rural energy empowerment by creating access to modern energy carriers and climate change mitigation

a theory of participation in elections we analyze a model of participation in elections in which voting is costly and no vote is pivotal ethical agents are motivated to participate when they determine that agents of their type are obligated to do so unlike previous duty based models of participation in our model an ethical agent s obligation to vote is determined endogenously as a function of the behavior of other agents our model predicts high turnout and comparative statics that are consistent with strategic behavior jel d72

does gender matter for political leadership the case of u s mayors abstract what are the consequences of electing a female leader for policy and political outcomes we answer this question in the context of u s cities where women s participation in mayoral elections increased from negligible numbers in 1970 to about one third of the elections in the 2000 s a novel data set of u s mayoral elections from 1950 to 2005 was used and a regression discontinuity design was employed to deal with the endogeneity of female candidacy to city characteristics in contrast to most research on the influence of female leadership we find no effect of gender of the mayor on policy outcomes related to the size of local government the composition of municipal spending and employment or crime rates these results hold both in the short and the long run while female mayors do not implement different policies they do appear to have higher unobserved political skills as they have at least a 5 percentage point higher incumbent effect than a comparable male but we find no evidence of political spillovers exogenously electing a female mayor does not change the long run political success of other female mayoral candidates in the same city or of female candidates in local congressional elections

closeness expenditures and turnout in the 1982 u s house elections students of elections have repeatedly found that the closeness of an election is modestly correlated with turnout this may be due to a direct response of instrumentally motivated voters but recent theoretical work casts doubt on the adequacy of this explanation another possibility is that elite actors respond to closeness with greater effort at mobilization we explore the latter possibility by using fec and state data on campaign expenditures in house senate and gubernatorial races our results indicate that closeness has an effect at both the mass and elite levels we also provide quantitative estimates of the effect of senate and gubernatorial expenditure on house turnout

rural electricity access in south asia is grid extension the remedy a critical review abstract despite the historical priority to grid based electrification in south asia two out of every five people in the region still live without access to electricity due to various limitations of conventional grid based rural electrification as brought out by a number of studies and reports demand for alternative models such as renewable energy based off grid and distributed generation solutions are gaining increasing attention globally however due to the absence of any study that could juxtapose these two modes in terms of their merits and demerits it is difficult to infer on their relative superiority or inferiority in view of that this paper makes an attempt to connect the dots by carrying out an extensive review of the literature to analyse the role of grid and off grid options in facilitating rural electrification and come out with a comparative assessment of their costs and impacts on the south asian countries the paper infers that instead of considering each of the modes of electrification in a standalone manner and perceiving them as mutually exclusive or competing with one another as usually perceived in the policy sphere off grid electrification can actually be considered as a complementary mode and should ideally be integrated with grid expansion to serve the bigger cause of ensuring universal and sustainable rural electrification in south asia

sustainable model for financial viability of decentralized biomass gasifier based power projects this paper made a modest attempt for designing a sustainable model for financial viability of biomass gasifier power projects for enhancing electricity access in india and other developing countries for long term sustainability of distributed generation projects in remote rural areas viability from both project implementing agency pia and the end users need to be ensured the minimum required prices of electricity from both pia and end user perspective have been estimated while for pia the cost recovery is the key for viability the affordability to pay the electricity cost is crucial for the end users analysis carried out in this paper on the basis of data obtained from operational projects implemented in india reveal that it is essential to operate the system at a higher capacity utilization factor while this can be achieved though creating convergence with locally relevant economic activity it is also observed that micro enterprises cannot pay beyond a certain price of electricity to keep it sustainable this paper sets forth a case for developing a regulatory mechanism to extend the tariff fixation for the projects and providing cross subsidies to ensure long term sustainability of off grid project

contestation contingency and justice in the nordic low carbon energy transition the five nordic countries have aggressive climate and energy policies in place and have already emerged to be leaders in renewable energy and energy efficiency denmark is renowned for its pioneering use of wind energy finland and sweden bioenergy norway hydroelectricity and iceland geothermal energy all countries aim to be virtually fossil free by 2050 this study explores the nordic energy transition through the lens of three interconnected research questions how are they doing it what challenges exist and what broader lessons result for energy policy the study firstly investigates the pathways necessary for these five countries to achieve their low carbon goals it argues that a concerted effort must be made to 1 promote decentralized and renewable forms of electricity supply 2 shift to more sustainable forms of transport 3 further improve the energy efficiency of residential and commercial buildings and 4 adopt carbon capture and storage technologies for industry however the section that follows emphasizes some of the empirical barriers the nordic transition must confront namely political contestation technological contingency and social justice and recognition concerns the study concludes with implications for what such historical progress and future transition pathways mean for both energy researchers and energy planners

organizations in economic analysis three economic environments are reviewed and in each organizations play an essential role for an adverse selection insurance economy we find that when mutual insurance arrangements are permitted an equilibrium necessarily exists and is optimal this example and the two others illustrate the problems that may result from imposing organizational structure on an environment rather than permitting the structure to be determined endogenously les organisations dans l analyse economique les auteurs examinent trois sortes d environnement economique dans chacun des cas les organisations jouent un role fondamental dans le cas d une economie avec assurance et selection adverse les auteurs suggerent que quand des arrangements d assurance mutuelle sont permis un equilibre existe necessairement et est optimal cet environnement ainsi que les deux autres etudies par les auteurs illustre les problemes qui peuvent resulter quand on impose une structure organisationnelle sur un environnement plutot que de permettre a la structure organisationnelle d emerger de fakon endogene

analyzing the turnout competition link with aggregate cross sectional data numerous papers by public choice oriented scholars and others have sought to test the hypothesis inspired by downs 1957 that ceteris paribus turnout should be higher when elections are close most look in cross sectional terms at variations in turnout at the constituency level for elections of a given type by and large the results have been disappointing see e g foster 1984 we are skeptical of these weak findings and argue that a complete portrait of the turnout competition link requires us to examine that link for at least three different types of turnout turnout among potential eligibles turnout among registrants and turnout for a given office relative to other offices such as top of the ticket and to take into account longitudinal changes in turnout for recent off year elections to the u s senate and also for off year elections to the u s house of representatives in states where there was no gubernatorial or senatorial contest on the ballot we find strong evidence for higher turnout among eligibles in close contests for these elections to the u s senate we also find evidence for an ecological effect that leads to turnout being maximized at values of competition other than 50 50 moreover when we look at turnout for office relative to top of the ticket voting in the california assembly and the u s senate in presidential years we again find some evidence for an ecological effect in which turnout is maximized at a value of republican vote share above 50 percent and find further strong evidence for a clear link between competition and turnout for office among those at the polls

modeling secrecy and deception in a multiple period attacker defender signaling game abstract in this paper we apply game theory to model strategies of secrecy and deception in a multiple period attacker defender resource allocation and signaling game with incomplete information at each period we allow one of the three possible types of defender signals truthful disclosure secrecy and deception we also allow two types of information updating the attacker updates his knowledge about the defender type after observing the defender s signals and also after observing the result of a contest if one occurs in any given time period our multiple period model provides insights into the balance between capital and expense for defensive investments and the effects of defender private information such as defense effectiveness target valuations and costs and also shows that defenders can achieve more cost effective security through secrecy and deception possibly lasting more than one period in a multiple period game this paper helps to fill a significant gap in the literature in particular to our knowledge no past work has studied defender secrecy and deception in a multiple period game moreover we believe that the solution approach developed and applied in this paper would prove useful in other types of multiple period games

a group rule utilitarian approach to voter turnout theory and evidence this paper explores a group rule utilitarian approach to understanding voter turnout inspired by the theoretical work of john c harsanyi 1980 and timothy j feddersen and alvaro sandroni 2002 it develops a model based on this approach and studies its performance in explaining turnout in texas liquor referenda the results are encouraging the comparative static predictions of the model are broadly consistent with the data and a structurally estimated version of the model yields reasonable coefficient estimates and fits the data well the structurally estimated model also outperforms a simple expressive voting model

coalition formation as a dynamic process abstract we study coalition formation as an ongoing dynamic process with payoffs generated as coalitions form disintegrate or regroup a process of coalition formation pcf is an equilibrium if a coalitional move to some other state can be justified by the expectation of higher future value compared to inaction this future value in turn is endogenous it depends on coalitional movements at each node we study existence of equilibrium pcfs we connect deterministic equilibrium pcfs with unique absorbing state to the core and equilibrium pcfs with multiple absorbing states to the largest consistent set in addition we study cyclical as well as stochastic equilibrium pcfs

understanding the political economy and key drivers of energy access in addressing national energy access priorities and policies abstract globally 1 5 billion people lack access to electricity and nearly 3 billion lack access to modern cooking energy options of the world s energy poor 95 are in asia and sub saharan africa within asia almost 80 of electricity deprived and 86 of biomass dependent populations are in the big 5 countries bangladesh china india indonesia and pakistan in this paper we discuss the broad contours of the political economy of energy access in these countries the political economy is assessed through an examination of three sustainability objectives accessibility of physical infrastructure energy service delivery and conformance to social goals the key areas of concern include emphasis on supply driven grid electricity vested power dynamics favouring affluent and urban areas unreliability of energy service provision and misdirected and misappropriated subsidies the above mentioned issues are responsible for limiting accelerated achievement of universal energy access in the big 5 countries and need to be addressed through innovative approaches the paper emphasizes the need for firm commitments policy convergence and the implementation of pro poor equitable energy policies through a broad based energy framework of bench marked technology neutral energy provisioning that ensures reliability and equity it highlights the need for reorienting of the subsidy regime and incorporating energy service delivery indicators in monitoring and reporting mechanisms

inventories and the volatility of production a stylized fact associated with inventory behavior is that the variance of production exceeds the variance of sales this paper presents a model of production decisions with demand uncertainty that incorporates no nnegativity constraints on inventories even with no productivity shocks optimal behavior by the firm is consistent with this stylized fact either if demand exhibits positive serial correlation or if the firm can backlog excess demand the reason is that a demand shock affects both the actual inventory level given unchanged production and the desired level production must replenish the stock and adjust to the new desired level copyright 1987 by american economic association

television and voter turnout i use variation across markets in the timing of television s introduction to identify its impact on voter turnout the estimated effect is significantly negative accounting for between a quarter and a half of the total decline in turnout since the 1950s i argue that substitution away from other media with more political coverage provides a plausible mechanism linking television to voting as evidence for this i show that the entry of television in a market coincided with sharp drops in consumption of newspapers and radio and in political knowledge as measured by election surveys i also show that both the information and turnout effects were largest in off year congressional elections which receive extensive coverage in newspapers but little or no coverage on television

the geography of energy and education leaders laggards and lessons for achieving primary and secondary school electrification even though large scale electricity networks have existed for more than a century thousands of primary and secondary schools have no electricity more than 80 percent of children in sub saharan africa attend primary schools that lack electricity more than a quarter of village schools in india lack electricity access and fewer than half of peruvian schools are electrified collectively nearly 200 million children attend schools not connected to any type of electricity supply a number greater than the populations of nigeria bangladesh russia or japan throughout the globe certain countries and regions lead the way in school electrification while others lag behind through the lens of energy and education geography this article identifies a series of interconnected challenges to electrifying schools obstacles span financing and technical reliability to bias in educational and energy funding to inability of electrification to yield net positive learning outcomes despite these challenges solutions do exist as the activities of emerging energy leaders demonstrate high upfront costs can be mitigated by tapping into diverse financing streams and distributing risk through public private partnerships technical problems can be countered by stable policy frameworks with strong technical standards and certification schemes electrification efforts can be coupled with household and cooking programs that build community this article shows that schools can provide students with the light heat and modern tools of teaching they deserve if planners investors and policymakers make determined coordinated efforts at providing energy for education

what moves and works broadening the consideration of energy poverty greater detail on the specific technological and planning challenges facing energy deprived developing economies is required to improve energy policy making and development assistance practice the current literature tends to highlight electricity services and to a lesser extent clean cooking this article calls for a closer look at mobility and mechanical power as essential energy services in addition to a refinement of the specific institutional arrangements needed to reduce energy poverty and deprivation this article augments and refines arguments made by morgan bazilian and his colleagues in their viewpoint more heat and light

scaling up biomass gasifier use an application specific approach abstract biomass energy accounts for about 11 of the global primary energy supply and it is estimated that about 2 billion people worldwide depend on biomass for their energy needs yet most of the use of biomass is in a primitive and inefficient manner primarily in developing countries leading to a host of adverse implications on human health environment workplace conditions and social well being therefore the utilization of biomass in a clean and efficient manner to deliver modern energy services to the world s poor remains an imperative for the development community one possible approach to do this is through the use of biomass gasifiers although significant efforts have been directed towards developing and deploying biomass gasifiers in many countries scaling up their dissemination remains an elusive goal based on an examination of biomass gasifier development demonstration and deployment efforts in india a country with more than two decades of experiences in biomass gasifier development and dissemination this article identifies a number of barriers that have hindered widespread deployment of biomass gasifier based energy systems it also suggests a possible approach for moving forward which involves a focus on specific application areas that satisfy a set of criteria that are critical to deployment of biomass gasifiers and then tailoring the scaling up strategy to the characteristics of the user groups for that application our technical financial economic and institutional analysis suggests an initial focus on four categories of applications small and medium enterprises the informal sector biomass processing industries and some rural areas may be particularly feasible and fruitful

the trials and tribulations of the village energy security programme vesp in india the indian ministry of new and renewable energy mnre launched the village energy security programme vesp in 2004 but discontinued it during the 12th five year plan starting in 2012 after a series of unexpected challenges planners structured the program so that a village energy committee vec ran a decentralized village program involving biomass gasifiers straight vegetable oil svo systems biogas plants and improved cookstoves this suite of technologies was intended to produce electricity and thermal energy to meet the total energy requirements of rural communities at the end of january 2011 a total of 79 vesp projects were sanctioned in 9 states and 65 of these projects were fully commissioned yet more than half were not operational the mnre envisaged that the vesp would provide energy services to eradicate poverty improve health reduce drudgery enhance education raise agricultural productivity create employment generate income and reduce migration however vesp projects have had limited success and the trials and tribulations of the vesp offers important lessons for policymakers launching rural energy programs in india and other developing economies

estimating the electoral effects of voter turnout there are two undercurrents to much of the literature on voter turnout a normative belief that high rates of voter participation are desirable and an empirical expectation that variation in voter turnout will have electoral consequences to some extent these undercurrents flow together although one might argue that high turnout is preferable for purely expressive reasons the typical normative claim asserts that increased levels of voter participation improve the quality of representation by reducing any bias that might result from dissimilarities between voters and nonvoters assumed differences between those who vote and those who do not are also at the heart of the commonly hypothesized empirical relationship between aggregate turnout and partisan vote share as argued originally by the authors of the american voter campbell et al 1960 96 115 if nonvoters and occasional voters hold preferences that differ from those of habitual or core voters then variation in turnout is likely to have meaningful electoral implications higher turnout might advantage one party over another might advantage incumbents or perhaps

the impact of closeness on electoral participation exploiting the italian double ballot system we investigate whether the degree of political competition affects electoral turnout by using italian municipal election data from 1993 to 2011 relying on elections held using a double ballot system we apply an instrumental variable technique exploiting the actual closeness between the two leading candidates in the first round as an instrument for closeness in the second round the use of this strategy to estimate the impact of closeness on turnout is new to the literature controlling for municipal fixed effects and candidates characteristics we find that expected closeness significantly increases turnout thus supporting the idea that the expected benefits of voting increase in tighter political races the estimated effect is much larger than that found when measuring closeness with ex post electoral results suggesting quite a relevant endogeneity bias in previous studies

the bullwhip effect on inventory a perspective on information quality abstractin recent years there has been a vast increase in the quantity of information shared across supply chain we investigate how the timeliness and accuracy of information quality affect the value of information sharing we use the inventory bullwhip effect bwe to measure the value of information sharing in a two level supply chain consisting of one retailer and one manufacturer the retailer faces a price sensitive demand and the price is an ar 1 process our study shows if customer demand and retailer s immediate order are delayed using retailer s historical order quantity to forecast can decrease manufacturer s bwe if information errors happen during delivery and utilization information sharing is not always valuable for the manufacturer sometimes no information sharing can decrease much more of bwe if information errors occur when the retailer collects demand information value of information sharing is more significant than when there are no information errors

side payment contracts in two person nonzero sum supply chain games review discussion and applications this paper investigates supply chain coordination with side payment contracts we first summarize specific side payment contracts and present our review on the literature that developed general side payment schemes to coordinate supply chains following our review we discuss two criteria that a proper side payment contract must satisfy and accordingly introduce a decision dependent transfer payment function and a constant transfer term we present the condition that the transfer function must satisfy and use nash arbitration scheme and shapley value to compute the constant transfer term and derive its closed form solution next we provide a five step procedure for the development of side payment contract and apply it to four supply chain games cournot and bertrand games a two retailer supply chain game with substitutable products and a one supplier one retailer supply chain more specifically for the cournot game we construct a linear transfer function and a constant side payment to coordinate two producers for the bertrand game we build a nonlinear transfer function which is equivalent to a revenue sharing contract and show that the constant term is zero and two firms in the game equally share the system wide profit for a supply chain with substitutable products we present a side payment contract to coordinate two retailers for a two echelon supply chain we develop a proper side payment scheme that can coordinate the supply chain and also help reduce the impact of forward buying on supply chain performance

your vote counts on account of the way it is counted an institutional solution to the paradox of not voting when we explicitly lay out all its steps we find that the paradox of not voting since the chance of one vote s making a difference is about zero why trouble to vote rests on a false but hitherto unremarked assumption about the institutional context of elections my solution to the paradox is more conservative than others that have been proposed and it yields a rational choice model of voting whose consequence accord well with empirical findings on turnout

turnout and closeness evidence from 60 years of bavarian mayoral elections one prediction of the calculus of voting is that electoral closeness positively aects turnout via a higher probability of one vote being decisive i test this theory with data on all mayoral elections in the german state of bavaria between 1946 and 2009 importantly i use constitutionally prescribed two round elections to measure electoral closeness and thereby improve on existing work that mostly uses expost measures that are prone to endogeneity the results suggest that electoral closeness matters a one standard deviation increase in closeness increases turnout by 1 68 percentage points which corresponds to 1 of a standard deviation in this variable i also evaluate how other factors like electorate size or rain on election day aect turnout dierentially depending on the closeness of the race

economic theories of voter turnout i the voting paradox why would the rational individual bother to spend time and resources to become well informed go to the polls on the election day and maybe even wait in a queue why would a rational voter vote downs 1957 ii the paradox of indeterminacy if they vote why do they care who they vote for kirchgassner 1992 kirchgassner and pommerehne 1993 iii the paradox of ignorance to the extent that information is costly the rational voter must be ignorant about relevant aspects of his decision making downs 1957

follow the leader theory and evidence on political participation using state by state voting data for u s presidential elections the authors observe that voter turnout is a positive function of predicted closeness to explain the strategic component of political participation they develop a follow the leader model political leaders expend effort according to their chance of being pivotal which depends on the expected closeness of the race at both state and national levels and how voters respond to their effort structural estimation supports this model for example a 1 percent increase in the predicted closeness at the state level stimulates leaders efforts which increases turnout by 0 34 percent

inferring strategic voting we estimate a model of strategic voting and quantify the impact it has on election outcomes because the model exhibits multiplicity of outcomes we adopt a set estimator using japanese general election data we nd a large fraction 75 3 80 3 of strategic voters only a small fraction 2 4 5 5 of whom voted for a candidate other than the one they most preferred misaligned voting existing empirical literature has not distinguished between the two estimating misaligned voting instead of strategic voting accordingly while our estimate of strategic voting is high our estimate of misaligned voting is comparable to previous studies

allocation of cost savings in a three level supply chain with demand information sharing a cooperative game approach we analyze the problem of allocating cost savings from sharing demand information in a three level supply chain with a manufacturer a distributor and a retailer to find a unique allocation scheme we use concepts from cooperative game theory first we analytically compute the expected cost incurred by the manufacturer and then use simulation to obtain expected costs for the distributor and the retailer we construct a three person cooperative game in characteristic function form and derive necessary conditions for the stability of each of five possible coalitions to divide the cost savings between two members or among three supply chain members we use various allocation schemes we present numerical analyses to investigate the impacts of the demand autocorrelation coefficient and the unit holding and shortage costs on the allocation scheme

enabling mini grid development in rural india summary rural electrification rates in india lag behind government goals in part due to the inability of distribution companies discoms to fund central grid expansion in the absence of central grid electrification mini grids offer significant potential for an immediate pathway toward rural electrification and the attendant gains in economic growth and productivity yet private investment in mini grids has been virtually absent in india using a comprehensive life cycle cost analysis we find that mini grids based on solar pv power and storage are more economical than incumbent energy services available to households without central grid connection under current law a prospective entrepreneur in india does not require a license or certification in order to build a mini grid and subsequently provide electricity services in the area covered by said installation conversely there is no legal or regulatory framework that specifies what is to happen if the central grid were to be extended to an area that is already covered by a mini grid we report detailed survey evidence from interviews with entrepreneurs analysts and policymakers whose assessments converge on the same point mini grid investments would be jeopardized in the event of central grid extension precisely because discoms would by regulatory order provide electricity services at highly subsidized rates well below their full economic cost our fieldwork suggests that the threat of central grid extension is a gateway barrier preventing mini grid development in india the issues associated with the gateway barrier have common elements with the so called holdup problem as identified in the economics of organizations there have been two recent federal policy guidelines and one actual state level policy addressing the regulatory status of mini grids we examine the effectiveness of these policies proposals in terms of an entrepreneur s willingness to develop mini grids in the future