A Partial Adjustment Model of U.S. Electricity Demand by Region, Season, and Sector

Identifying the factors that influence electricity demand in the continental United States and mathematically characterizing them are important for developing electricity consumption projections. The price elasticity of demand is especially important, since the electricity price effects of policy implementation can be substantial and the demand response to policy-induced changes in prices can significantly affect the cost of policy compliance. This paper estimates electricity demand functions with particular attention paid to the demand stickiness that is imposed by the capital-intensive nature of electricity consumption and to regional, seasonal, and sectoral variation. The analysis uses a partial adjustment model of electricity demand that is estimated in a fixed-effects OLS framework. This model formulation allows for the price elasticity to be expressed in both its short-run and long-run forms. Price elasticities are found to be broadly consistent with the existing literature, but with important regional, seasonal, and sectoral differences.electricity, demand elasticities, energy demand, partial adjustment

The Effects of Plant Community Diversity and Drought on Soil Microbial Communities and the Subsequent Effect on the Invasion Success of Common Exotic Species

From the Washington University Senior Honors Thesis Abstracts (WUSHTA), 2017. Published by the Office of Undergraduate Research. Joy Zalis Kiefer, Director of Undergraduate Research and Associate Dean in the College of Arts & Sciences; Lindsey Paunovich, Editor; Helen Human, Programs Manager and Assistant Dean in the College of Arts and Sciences Mentors: Scott Mangan and Claudia Stei

An Experimental Analysis of Auctioning Emissions Allowances under a Loose Cap

The direct sale of emissions allowances by auction is an emerging characteristic of cap-and-trade programs. This study is motivated by the observation that all of the major implementations of cap-and-trade regulations for the control of air pollution have started with a generous allocation of allowances relative to recent emissions history, a situation we refer to as a “loose cap.” Typically more stringent reductions are achieved in subsequent years of a program. We use an experimental setting to investigate the effects of a loose cap environment on a variety of auction types. We find all auction formats studied are efficient in allocating emissions allowances, but auction revenues tend to be lower relative to competitive benchmarks when the cap is loose. Regardless of whether the cap is tight or loose, the different auction formats tend to yield comparable revenues toward the end of a series of auctions. However, aggressive bidding behavior in initial discriminatory auctions yields higher revenues than in other auction formats, a difference that disappears as bidders learn to adjust their bids closer to the cutoff that separates winning and losing bids.auction, carbon dioxide, greenhouse gases, allowance trading, Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, RGGI, cap and trade

Cis-regulatory basis of sister cell type divergence in the vertebrate retina

Multicellular organisms evolved via repeated functional divergence of transcriptionally related sister cell types, but the mechanisms underlying sister cell type divergence are not well understood. Here, we study a canonical pair of sister cell types, retinal photoreceptors and bipolar cells, to identify the ke

Collusion in Auctions for Emission Permits: An Experimental Analysis

Environmental markets have several institutional features that provide a new context for the use of auctions and which have not been studied previously. This paper reports on laboratory experiments testing three auction forms -– uniform and discriminatory price sealed bid auctions and an ascending clock auction. We test the ability of subjects to tacitly or explicitly collude in order to maximize profits. Our main result is that the discriminatory and uniform price auctions produce greater revenues than the clock auction, both without and with explicit communication. The clock appears to be more subject to successful collusion because of its sequential structure and because it allows bidders to focus on one dimension of cooperation (quantity) rather than two (price and quantity).auctions, collusion, experiments, carbon dioxide, greenhouse gases

Price Discovery in Emissions Permit Auctions

Auctions are increasingly being used to allocate emissions allowances (“permitsâ€) for cap and trade and common-pool resource management programs. These auctions create thick markets that can provide important information about changes in current market conditions. This paper reports a laboratory experiment in which half of the bidders experienced unannounced increases in their willingness to pay for permits. The focus is on the extent to which the predicted price increase due to the demand shift is reflected in sales prices under alternative auction formats. Price tracking is comparably good for uniform-price sealed-bid auctions and for multi-round clock auctions, with or without end-of-round information about excess demand. More price inertia is observed for “pay as bid†(discriminatory) auctions, especially for a continuous discriminatory format in which bids could be changed at will during a pre-specified time window, in part because “sniping†in the final moments blocked the full effect of the demand shock.auction, greenhouse gases, price discovery, cap and trade, emission allowances, laboratory experiment

An Experimental Analysis of Auctioning Emission Allowances Under a Loose Cap

The direct sale of emission allowances by auction is an emerging characteristic of cap-and-trade programs. This study is motivated by the observation that all of the major implementations of cap-and-trade regulations for the control of air pollution have started with a generous allocation of allowances relative to recent emissions history, a situation we refer to as a “loose cap.†Typically more stringent reductions are achieved in subsequent years of a program. We use an experimental setting to investigate the effects of a loose cap environment on a variety of auction types. We find that all auction formats studied are efficient in allocating emission allowances, but auction revenues tend to be lower relative to competitive benchmarks when the cap is loose. Regardless of whether the cap is tight or loose, the different auction formats tend to yield comparable revenues toward the end of a series of auctions. However, aggressive bidding behavior in initial discriminatory auctions yields higher revenues than in the other auction formats, a difference that disappears as bidders learn to adjust their bids closer to the cut-off that separates winning and losing bids.auction, carbon dioxide, greenhouse gases, allowance trading, Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, RGGI, cap and trade, Environmental Economics and Policy, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

Integrating planning and reactive control

Our research is developing persistent agents that can achieve complex tasks in dynamic and uncertain environments. We refer to such agents as taskable, reactive agents. An agent of this type requires a number of capabilities. The ability to execute complex tasks necessitates the use of strategic plans for accomplishing tasks; hence, the agent must be able to synthesize new plans at run time. The dynamic nature of the environment requires that the agent be able to deal with unpredictable changes in its world. As such, agents must be able to react to unanticipated events by taking appropriate actions in a timely manner, while continuing activities that support current goals. The unpredictability of the world could lead to failure of plans generated for individual tasks. Agents must have the ability to recover from failures by adapting their activities to the new situation, or replanning if the world changes sufficiently. Finally, the agent should be able to perform in the face of uncertainty. The Cypress system, described here, provides a framework for creating taskable, reactive agents. Several features distinguish our approach: (1) the generation and execution of complex plans with parallel actions; (2) the integration of goal-driven and event driven activities during execution; (3) the use of evidential reasoning for dealing with uncertainty; and (4) the use of replanning to handle run-time execution problems. Our model for a taskable, reactive agent has two main intelligent components, an executor and a planner. The two components share a library of possible actions that the system can take. The library encompasses a full range of action representations, including plans, planning operators, and executable procedures such as predefined standard operating procedures (SOP's). These three classes of actions span multiple levels of abstraction