The settlement rule used to determine payments in electricity market auctions can have a profound impact on the amount paid for a particular service. This paper evaluates two auction settlement rules: the uniform price auction in which the last offer accepted determines the price paid to all participants and the discriminatory price auction in which each participant is paid the amount bid by th...

The idea of antitrust “safety zone”is stated in the Antitrust Guidelines by the U.S. Department of Justice and the FTC. Antitrust agencies, in principle, will not intervene in market activities if the degree of market power is within the safety zone. There is, however, no solid economic rationale for the precise degree of market power that can justify this safety zone. I propose a model that ca...

In this paper, we present a web-based, machine-learning enhanced news reader (PersoNews). The main advantages of PersoNews are the aggregation of many different news sources, machine learning filtering offering personalization not only per user but also for every feed a user is subscribed to, and finally the ability for every user to watch a more abstracted topic of interest by employing a simp...

As cloud computing grows in popularity and usage, providers of cloud services are facing challenges of scale and complexity; how can they ensure they are most efficiently using their existing infrastructure, and when should they invest in new infrastructure to meet demand? We propose a two-period model which utilises a third party called the Coordinator, who interacts with a population of resou...

The contract between the carrier and forwarder is a long-term issue, and the repeated contract business makes the forwarder develop a reference point based on the contract prices, and this reference effect, to a large extent, affects the forwarder’s contract purchasing decisions. Based on that, this paper introduces the reference effect in the sea-cargo supply chain and studies a multipleperiod...

To measure an unbiased farm-specific efficiency of individual dairy farmers, a shadow-price profit frontier adjusted for market distortion was applied to a sample of 860 Iranian small intensive dairy farms surveyed in 2005-2006. This measure was then compared with that of unadjusted measure that assumes undistorted market. A multiple general linear model (GLM) technique was applied to the data ...

In recent years, the interest in clean renewable energy resources, such as wind and photovoltaic, has grown rapidly. It is well known that the inherent variability in wind power generation and the related difficulty in predicting future generation profiles, raise major challenges to wind power integration into the electricity grid. In this work we study the problem of optimizing energy bids for...

The recent activity in pension buyouts and bespoke longevity swaps suggests that a significant process of aggregation of longevity exposures is under way, led by major investment banks and buyout firms with the support of leading reinsurers. As regulatory capital charges and limited reinsurance capacity constrain the scope for market growth, there is now an opportunity for institutions that are...

This paper argues that electricity market reform – particularly the need for complementary mechanisms to remunerate capacity – need to be analysed in the light of the local regulatory and institutional environment. If there is a lack of investment, the priority should be to identify the roots of the problem. The lack of demand side response, short-term reliability management procedures and unco...

In many European countries, natural gas-fired power plants are considered a possibility to quickly compensate the expected shortfall in electric energy supply. Increasing gasfired generation capacity would also increase the couplings and interactions between gas and electricity systems. So far, gas power plants participate in two different markets gas and electricity. Coupling these markets by ...