The Price Impact of Energy Vouchers

Marion Podesta, Jean-Christophe Poudou and Michel Roland

The Energy Journal, 2021, vol. 42, issue 3, 27-54

Abstract: France and South Korea have implemented voucher programs to counter energy poverty. In contrast to goods that traditional voucher programs target, the market structure that dominates energy supply is the oligopoly. In this paper, we study the price impact of vouchers in this market structure. We first state conditions on demand elasticities that make the choice of vouchers consistent with the regulator’s objective of eliminating energy poverty. We then model a game between energy suppliers and the regulator, where suppliers maximize profit while the regulator ensures that no consumer spends more than a given share of income on energy.From a benchmark case without vouchers, we show that vouchers reduce the energy price under simultaneous decision making or when the regulator moves first. However, the price impact of vouchers is ambiguous if firms move first. This scenario’s price is above the price of the simultaneous decision scenario’s price.

Keywords: Energy poverty; Vouchers; Oligopoly; Regulation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.5547/01956574.42.3.mpod (text/html)

Related works:
Journal Article: The Price Impact of Energy Vouchers (2021)
Working Paper: The Price Impact of Energy Vouchers (2021)
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:sae:enejou:v:42:y:2021:i:3:p:27-54

DOI: 10.5547/01956574.42.3.mpod

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in The Energy Journal
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().