Efficient Regulation with Little Information: Reality in the Limit?
提出一种监管方案，即使监管者对技术和需求知之甚少，也能使企业定价收敛至拉姆齐价格并实现生产效率，通过不对称的审查概率机制克服了Averch-Johnson过度资本化效应。
We present a regulatory scheme that converges to Ramsey pricing and productive efficiency, even if regulators have little information about technology or demand. The model has firms selecting prices subject to the regulator's requirement that the firm earn a on capital at today's capital stock and output levels. Regulators then review later performance, and are more likely to request new rate hearings as the firm's return deviates more from the fair As long as regulators do not review negative returns too fast relative to positive returns, these conditions are sufficient for convergence to Ramsey prices and productive efficiency. Public utility regulators generally set prices, not rates of return per se. These prices, however, often are meant to achieve approximately some target rate of return. But when projecting how prices will affect rates of return, regulators are often at the mercy of the firms for economic projections about the effects of various price vectors (e.g., across customer classes) upon profits. So if realized rates of return deviate from targets, regulators may call new rate hearings, and they may expedite these hearings if the deviations are large.2 By formalizing these real world observations some rather surprising efficiency results appear. Suppose that regulators have no knowledge of demands and technologies, but can observe past realizations of prices and quantities. If the review probabilities are as noted above, and satisfy an asymmetry condition, then this regulatory process may converge not only to productive efficiency (overcoming Averch-Johnson over-capitalization effects), but to Ramsey prices. These conclusions are derived from unifying and extending work by Bawa and Sibley (1980) and Vogelsang and Finsinger (1979).