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"UTILITIES"
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Understanding electric utilities and de-regulation
\"Power interruptions of the scale of the North American Blackout of 2003 are rare, but they still loom as a possibility. Will the aging infrastructure fail because de-regulated monopolies have no financial incentives to upgrade? Is centralized planning becoming subordinate to market forces? Understanding Electric Utilities and De-Regulation, Second Edition provides an updated, non-technical description that sheds light on the nature of the industry and the issues involved in its transition away from a regulated environment.\"--Jacket.
Book
Measurement properties of the EQ-5D-5L compared to the EQ5D-3L in psoriasis patients
The purpose of this study is to assess the measurement properties of EQ-5D-5L compared to EQ-5D-3L in psoriasis patients. Methods A cross-sectional survey was carried out at an academic dermatology clinic in Hungary. Psoriasis patients completed the EQ-5D-3L, EQ-5D-5L and Dermatology Life Quality Index (DLQI) questionnaires, and Psoriasis Area and Severity Index (PASI) was assessed. The UK value sets were used to calculate the 3L and 5L index scores. We tested the feasibility, ceiling effect, redistribution properties, the level of inconsistency and informativity (Shannon and Shannon Evenness indices). Spearman's rank-order correlations were performed between EQ-5D, EQ VAS, DLQI and PASI scores. Known-groups validity was evaluated by comparing age groups, clinical subtypes and treatment groups. Results Mean age of the 238 patients was 47 years, and 36.6% of them received biological therapy. Mean EQ-5D index score was 0.77 (SD: 0.26) with the 3L and 0.84 (SD: 0.19) with the 5L. The overall ceiling effect decreased from 37.1 (3L) to 32.9% (5L). Shannon index improved significantly for most dimensions, but Shannon Evenness index improved only in three dimensions. Compared to the 3L, the 5L version confirmed a better convergent validity with PASI, but not with the DLQI. Known-groups validity was equally demonstrated both for the 5L and 3L. Conclusions The EQ-5D-5L seems to improve measurement properties by reducing ceiling effects, strengthening correlations with PASI and improving informativity. Follow-up studies are needed to test responsiveness and reliability in psoriasis.
Journal Article
CAUTIOUS EXPECTED UTILITY AND THE CERTAINTY EFFECT
Many violations of the independence axiom of expected utility can be traced to subjects' attraction to risk-free prospects. The key axiom in this paper, negative certainty independence (Dillenberger (2010)), formalizes this tendency. Our main result is a utility representation of all preferences over monetary lotteries that satisfy negative certainty independence together with basic rationality postulates. Such preferences can be represented as if the agent were unsure of how to evaluate a given lottery p; instead, she has in mind a set of possible utility functions over outcomes and displays a cautious behavior: she computes the certainty equivalent of p with respect to each possible function in the set and picks the smallest one. The set of utilities is unique in a well defined sense. We show that our representation can also be derived from a \"cautious\" completion of an incomplete preference relation.
Journal Article
Ellsberg Revisited: An Experimental Study
An extension to Ellsberg's experiment demonstrates that attitudes to ambiguity and compound objective lotteries are tightly associated. The sample is decomposed into three main groups: subjective expected utility subjects, who reduce compound objective lotteries and are ambiguity neutral, and two groups that exhibit different forms of association between preferences over compound lotteries and ambiguity, corresponding to alternative theoretical models that account for ambiguity averse or seeking behavior.
Journal Article
The US Electricity Industry After 20 Years of Restructuring
Electricity restructuring in the 1990s ended the era of vertically integrated monopolies in many states, allowing nonutility generators to sell electricity to utilities and, in fewer states, allowing retail service providers to buy electricity from generators and sell to end-use customers. We review the economic arguments for restructuring and the resulting effects in subsequent years. We argue that the greatest political motivation for restructuring was rent shifting, not efficiency improvements. Although electricity restructuring has brought efficiency improvements, it has generally been viewed as a disappointment because the price-reduction promises made by some advocates were based on politically unsustainable rent transfers. In reality, electricity rate changes since restructuring have been driven more by exogenous factors, such as generation technology advances and natural gas price fluctuations, than by restructuring. We argue that a similar dynamic underpins the current political momentum behind distributed generation, primarily rooftop solar photovoltaic systems, which remains costly from a societal viewpoint, but privately economic owing to the rent transfers it enables.
Journal Article
Optimal allocations with α-MaxMin utilities, Choquet expected utilities, and Prospect Theory
The analysis of optimal risk sharing has been thus far largely restricted to non-expected utility models with concave utility functions, where concavity is an expression of ambiguity aversion and/or risk aversion. This paper extends the analysis to α-maxmin expected utility, Choquet expected utility, and Cumulative Prospect Theory, which accommodate ambiguity seeking and risk seeking attitudes. We introduce a novel methodology of quasidifferential calculus of Demyanov and Rubinov (1986, 1992) and argue that it is particularly well-suited for the analysis of these three classes of utility functions which are neither concave nor differentiable. We provide characterizations of quasidifferentials of these utility functions, derive first-order conditions for Pareto optimal allocations under uncertainty, and analyze implications of these conditions for risk sharing with and without aggregate risk.
Journal Article