| 来源类型 | Working Paper |
| 规范类型 | 报告 |
| DOI | 10.3386/w13679 |
| 来源ID | Working Paper 13679 |
| Principal-agent Incentives, Excess Caution, and Market Inefficiency: Evidence From Utility Regulation | |
| Severin Borenstein; Meghan Busse; Ryan Kellogg | |
| 发表日期 | 2007-12-20 |
| 出版年 | 2007 |
| 语种 | 英语 |
| 摘要 | Regulators and firms often use incentive schemes to attract skillful agents and to induce them to put forth effort in pursuit of the principals' goals. Incentive schemes that reward skill and effort, however, may also punish agents for adverse outcomes beyond their control. As a result, such schemes may induce inefficient behavior, as agents try to avoid actions that might make it easier to directly associate a bad outcome with their decisions. In this paper, we study how such caution on the part of individual agents may lead to inefficient market outcomes, focusing on the context of natural gas procurement by regulated public utilities. We posit that a regulated natural gas distribution company may, due to regulatory incentives, engage in excessively cautious behavior by foregoing surplus-increasing gas trades that could be seen ex post as having caused supply curtailments to its customers. We derive testable implications of such behavior and show that the theory is supported empirically in ways that cannot be explained by conventional price risk aversion or other explanations. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the reduction in efficient trade caused by the regulatory mechanism is most severe during periods of relatively high demand and low supply, when the benefits of trade would be greatest. |
| 主题 | Industrial Organization ; Regulatory Economics ; Industry Studies |
| URL | https://www.nber.org/papers/w13679 |
| 来源智库 | National Bureau of Economic Research (United States) |
| 引用统计 | |
| 资源类型 | 智库出版物 |
| 条目标识符 | http://119.78.100.153/handle/2XGU8XDN/571355 |
| 推荐引用方式 GB/T 7714 | Severin Borenstein,Meghan Busse,Ryan Kellogg. Principal-agent Incentives, Excess Caution, and Market Inefficiency: Evidence From Utility Regulation. 2007. |
| 条目包含的文件 | ||||||
| 文件名称/大小 | 资源类型 | 版本类型 | 开放类型 | 使用许可 | ||
| w13679.pdf（816KB） | 智库出版物 | 限制开放 | CC BY-NC-SA | 浏览 | ||
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