In most wholesale electricity markets generators must submit stepfunction offers of supply to a uniform price auction, and the market is cleared at the price of the most expensive offer needed to meet realised demand. Such markets can most elegantly be modelled as the purestrategy, Nash Equilibrium of continuous supply functions, in which each supplier has a unique profit maximising choice of supply function given the choices of other suppliers. Critics argue that the discreteness and discontinuity of the required steps can rule out pure-strategy equilibria and may result in price instability. This paper argues that if prices must be selected from a finite set the resulting step function converges to the continuous supply function as the number of steps increases, reconciling the apparently very disparate approaches to modelling electricity markets.
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Find related papers by JEL classification: D43 - Microeconomics - - Market Structure and Pricing - - - Oligopoly and Other Forms of Market Imperfection D44 - Microeconomics - - Market Structure and Pricing - - - Auctions C62 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Mathematical Methods and Programming - - - Existence and Stability Conditions of Equilibrium L94 - Industrial Organization - - Industry Studies: Transportation and Utilities - - - Electric Utilities
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