OPERATIONAL RESEARCH SOCIETY OF NEW ZEALAND
Professor Rothkopf is an Operational Research Society of New
Zealand
Visiting Lecturer for 1999, and a plenary speaker at the 34th annual
conference
of ORSNZ to be held at Waikato University on December 10-11. Light
refreshments
courtesy of the Operational Research Society of New Zealand will be
served
in the 12th floor common room of the School of Engineering following
the
seminar. All welcome.
Abstract
Deregulation of electricity generation in the US is leading to
regional
daily auctions for electricity supply. This talk will discuss some of
the
kinds of auctions that are being tried or proposed and some of the
issues
that arise. A major part of the talk will be an evaluation of
a truth
revealing auction for supply and demand bidding with nonconcave
benefits.
(This is joint work with Benjamin F. Hobbs of The Johns Hopkins
University
and Richard P. O’Neill and Laurel C. Hyde of the US Federal Energy
Regulatory
Commission.) The auction is an implementation of the
Vickrey-Clarke-Groves
mechanism. In theory, it achieves efficient resource
allocation if
firms maximize profits. However, the auction has several
undesirable
properties. It is revenue deficient, can be gamed by
cooperation
between a supplier and a consumer, and is subject to the same kinds of
information revelation and bid-taker cheating concerns that make single
item Vickrey auctions rare.