Risk aversion in imperfect natural gas markets

Rudolf Egging-Bratseth, Alois Pichler, Øyvind Iversen Kalvø and Walle–Hansen, Thomas Meyer

European Journal of Operational Research, 2017, vol. 259, issue 1, 367-383

Abstract: This paper presents a natural gas market equilibrium model that considers uncertainty in shale gas reserve exploration. Risk aversion is modeled using a risk measure known as the Average Value-at-Risk (also referred to as the Conditional Value-at-Risk). In the context of the European natural gas market, we show how risk aversion affects investment behavior of a Polish and a Ukrainian natural gas supplier. As expected, increased risk aversion leads generally to lower investment, and a larger share of investments in the form of lower risk alternatives, i.e., conventional resources. However, in our market setting where multiple risk-averse agents each maximize their own profits we do observe some counter-intuitive, non-monotonic results. It is noteworthy that in a competitive market, risk aversion leads to significantly lower reserve exploration, which may be interpreted as a credible threat by a large dominating supplier (such as Russia). A threat to flood natural gas markets could deter importing countries from extending their own reserve bases.

Keywords: Stochastic equilibrium; Nonlinear programming; Risk measures; Natural gas markets (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0377221716308530
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
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:eee:ejores:v:259:y:2017:i:1:p:367-383

DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2016.10.020

Access Statistics for this article

European Journal of Operational Research is currently edited by Roman Slowinski, Jesus Artalejo, Jean-Charles. Billaut, Robert Dyson and Lorenzo Peccati

More articles in European Journal of Operational Research from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().