Are solar panels commodities? A Bayesian hierarchical approach to detecting quality differences and asymmetric information

Johannes Mauritzen

European Journal of Operational Research, 2020, vol. 280, issue 1, 365-382

Abstract: Solar panels should not be considered commodities. Considerable quality differences, as measured directly by degradation of production over time, are found between manufacturers. I test two implications from the theory of asymmetric information of quality and find: (1) Solar power systems with high-information third-party owners display higher quality than host-owned systems. (2) Furthermore, with a 85% probability, the price of solar panels that are owned by high-information owners are more highly correlated to quality. Methodologically, the article demonstrates a novel application of Bayesian hierarchical regression models that are increasingly popular in operations research and the decision sciences.

Keywords: Solar power; Commodities; Asymmetric information; quality; Bayesian hierarchical model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0377221719305624
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:280:y:2020:i:1:p:365-382

DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2019.07.001

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 ().