Misunderstanding Nonlinear Prices: Evidence from a Natural Experiment on Residential Electricity Demand
利用加拿大不列颠哥伦比亚省居民用电的自然实验，发现部分家庭严重误解非线性电价，误以为边际电价适用于所有消费，这种误解虽人数少但总体影响大，掩盖了多数人对平均价格的反应，并造成相当于年电费10%的福利损失。
This paper examines how consumers respond to nonlinear prices. Exploiting a natural experiment with electricity consumers in British Columbia, I find evidence that some households severely misunderstand nonlinear prices—incorrectly perceiving that the marginal price applies to all consumption, not simply the last unit. While small in number, the exaggerated responses by these households have a large effect in aggregate, masking an otherwise predominant response to average price. Largely unexplored in the literature, this type of misunderstanding has important economic, policy, and methodological implications beyond electricity markets. I estimate the welfare loss for these households to be the equivalent of 10 percent of annual electricity expenditure.