Using Forward Contracts to Reduce Regulatory Capture

Felix Höffler and Sebastian Kranz

Discussion Paper Series of SFB/TR 15 Governance and the Efficiency of Economic Systems from Free University of Berlin, Humboldt University of Berlin, University of Bonn, University of Mannheim, University of Munich

Abstract: A fully unbundled, regulated network firm of unknown efficiency level can untertake unobservable effort to increase the likelihood of low downstream prices, e.g. by facilitating downstream competition. To incentivize such effort, the regulator can use an incentive scheme paying transfers to the firm contingent on realized downstream prices. Alternatively, the regulator can force the firm to sell the following forward contracts: the firm pays the downstream price to the owners of a contract, but recieves the expected value of the contracts when selling them to a competivitve financial market. We compare the two regulatory tools with respect to regulatory capture: if the regulator can be bribed to suppress information on the underlying state of the world (the basic propability of high downstream prices, or the type of the firm), optimal regulation uses forward contracts only.

Keywords: incentive regulation; regulatory capture; virtual power plants (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: K23 L42 L51 L94 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-cta, nep-ind, nep-mic and nep-reg
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://epub.ub.uni-muenchen.de/13234/1/320.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Using Forward Contracts to Reduce Regulatory Capture (2015)
Working Paper: Using Forward Contracts to Reduce Regulatory Capture (2011)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:trf:wpaper:320

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Paper Series of SFB/TR 15 Governance and the Efficiency of Economic Systems from Free University of Berlin, Humboldt University of Berlin, University of Bonn, University of Mannheim, University of Munich Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tamilla Benkelberg (sfb-tr15@vwl.uni-muenchen.de).