Network Regulation under electoral competition
通过实验室实验，研究了选举竞争对垄断定价的影响，发现选举竞争能降低价格，但与激励监管结合时效果消失，表明两者存在替代关系。
Academics and policymakers generally agree that energy infrastructure should be subject to price regulation. More and more critics of modern regulatory approaches, however, point to the apparent failures of these mechanisms to achieve competitive pricing in practice. Some have suggested that customers ought to be involved in the regulatory process, but it is uncertain how customers' perspectives can best be incorporated. In this study, we evaluate how electoral competition influences monopoly pricing by extending well-known regulatory laboratory experiments. We show that electoral competition has a significant and negative impact on prices. This effect disappears when electoral competition is implemented jointly with incentive regulation, implying substitutability rather than complementarity of regulation and electoral competition. • There is a trend to include customers when energy networks are regulated. • We explore one form of customer involvement in the lab: electoral competition (EC). • All else equal, EC lowers monopoly prices. • When combined with incentive regulation, the effect of EC vanishes.