Demand Uncertainty and the Regulated Firm
研究需求不确定性如何影响受监管电力企业的产能选择，基于Joskow的监管模型，探讨现行费率监管是否激励企业在不确定下增加投资。
In this paper, we investigate the impact of demand uncertainty on the choice of plant capacity by a regulated firm. Over the past few years, demand uncertainty has become a major element in the decision-making of utilities, and particularly in their decision-making with respect to capacity choices. In a recent study by SRI [1977], it was reported that to maximize expected consumers' surplus, more generating capacity was required for the electric utility industry when operating under demand uncertainty than under demand certainty.1 This finding raises the question whether the structure of rate regulation of electric utilities provides the appropriate incentives for them to invest in more capacity under demand uncertainty then under certainty. The present paper addresses such questions. The model of the regulated firm that is employed in this paper derives from the work of Joskow [1974] concerning the recent history of rate regulation in the electric utility industry. Briefly, Joskow reported that during the 1960s and the early 1970s, the impetus for rate reviews in the electric utility industry came mainly from the utilities and not from the public utility commissions (PUC's). Joskow's findings are corroborated by data for the period 1948-1978. A study of all rate cases involving electric utilities in the U.S. for that period shows that of a total of 363 cases, 350 of these were instances of utility-initiated rate reviews and only 13 were cases of PUC-initiated reviews.2 From the point-of-view of the formal theory of the regulated firm, this strongly suggests that the Averch-Johnson model of a firm operating at or near an rate of return constraint (with the allowed rate of return being in excess of the cost of capital to the firm) should be replaced by a model of price regulation in which attention is shifted to the non-negativity of profits constraint, or, at least, this should be done with respect to the electric utility industry. With some elaborations, this is basically what we do in this paper, building on the approach adopted in a recent paper on a related topic.3