Introduction In the early 1990's the power supply industries worldwide started to undergo a period of extensive changes. Electricity markets moved away from vertically integrated monopolies towards liberalized structures with power delivery being a bundle of several services mainly including generation, transmission and distribution. One reason for restructuring lied in the expectation that com...

In electricity markets, the choice of the right pricing regime is crucial for the utilities because the price they charge to their consumers, in anticipation of their demand in real-time, is a key determinant of their profits and ultimately their survival in competitive energy markets. Among the existing pricing regimes, in this paper, we consider ex-ante dynamic pricing schemes as (i) they hel...

We analyze and compare fixed-fee and usage-fee software pricing schemes — in fixed-fee pricing, all users pay the same price; in usage-fee pricing, the users’ fees depend on the amount that they use the software (e.g., the user of an online-database service might be charged for each data query). We employ a two-dimensional model of customer heterogeneity — specifically, we assume that customers...

The paper deals with the competitive effects of price guarantees in a spatial duopoly where consumers can search for lower prices but have to incur hassle costs if they want to claim a price guarantee. It is shown that symmetric equilibria with and without price guarantees exist but price guarantees will have no effect on prices if search costs are low, hassle costs are high and the number of u...

We develop a price competition model for a new supply chain that competes in a market comprised of some rival supply chains. The new supply chain has one risk-neutral manufacturer and one risk-averse retailer in which the manufacturer is a leader and retailer is a follower. The manufacturer pays a fraction of the risk cost (caused by demand uncertainty) to the retailer. We apply this competitiv...

In recent years, the quasi-Monte Carlo approach for pricing high-dimensional derivative securities has been used widely relative to other competitive approaches such as the Monte Carlo methods. Such success can be, in part, attributed to the notion of effective dimension of the finance problems. In this paper, we provide additional insight on the connection between the effective dimension and t...

Most customers in electricity markets do not face prices that change frequently to reflect changes in wholesale costs, known as real-time pricing (RTP). We show that not only does time-invariant pricing in competitive markets lead to prices and investment that are not first best, it even fails to achieve the constrained second-best optimum. Increasing the share of customers on RTP is likely to ...