Balancing information rents and service differentiation in utility regulation
研究了区域公用事业监管中，如何平衡限制信息租金（企业利用成本信息优势获取超额利润）与通过服务差异化满足消费者偏好之间的权衡，并讨论了该权衡对基于对话和谈判的监管框架的局限性。
In the regulation of natural monopolies such as regional utilities, several goals must be balanced. In this paper, we focus on the trade-off between information rents and service differentiation. Consumers in different regions may prefer different service levels and service mixes. The services provided should therefore ideally be aligned with the preferences of regional consumers. The utilities, however, have superior information about the cost of different services. This allows them to extract information rents by claiming high costs for the provided services. A relative performance evaluation in the form of benchmarking is typically used to limit information rents, but benchmarking is less efficient when service profiles are heterogenous. Hence, there is a trade-off between minimizing information rents and maximizing the adjustment to consumer preferences via service differentiation. In this paper, we study this trade-off in a simple principal–agent model and discuss how it may limit the usefulness of recent regulatory frameworks based on dialog and negotiations with utilities about which services to provide.