Doctoral Dissertation Research in Economics: Direct Marketing as a Form of Price Discrimination in Residential Electricity Choice Markets

1996年至2007年间，美国许多州开放了住宅电力市场，以应对营利性公司的竞争。在此之前，同一城镇或城市的大多数家庭支付的电价都是相同的。在竞争中，一些家庭支付的价格是同一城镇或城市其他家庭的三倍，而低收入社区和脆弱社区的家庭往往支付特别高的价格。这项研究将调查为什么在美国东北部的几个电力市场上，低收入家庭往往比其他家庭支付更高的费用。在其他原因中，它将探索门到门营销和其他针对特定地理区域或社区的面对面营销的作用。该项目旨在通过分析额外的消费者保护政策的潜在收益和成本来帮助改善政策和减少不平等。本研究将分析零售电力重组对配电的影响。特别是，它将探索这样一个假设，即不同的搜索壁垒和昂贵的面对面营销创造了一个双重市场，在这个市场中，公司根据消费者的搜索障碍进行价格歧视。公司可以通过在网上为搜索的消费者提供低价，并直接向不搜索的消费者销售更高的价格来实现这一点。该项目团队将对马里兰州和康涅狄格州的1000户家庭进行调查和随机信息干预。这项调查旨在回答两个研究问题：1.为什么在价格较低的情况下，家庭会以较高的价格与直销商签约？2.为什么低收入家庭平均比高收入家庭以更高的价格签约购买电力产品？随机化的信息干预将能够分析搜索、切换和价格结果如何随着搜索成本的降低和对搜索好处的偏见而变化。这项调查还将探索不同社会人口群体在捆绑属性、惰性、搜索成本、信念偏差和对电力营销者的看法方面的差异。区分这些机制很重要，因为它们对福利和政策处方有不同的影响。本研究的目的是在现有文献的基础上，通过找出居民电力市场中无法解释的消费者决策错误的关键驱动因素，并探索在这一背景下的战略企业反应。此外，这个项目可能在两个方面对更广泛的经济文献做出贡献。首先，它将评估对价格分散的一种新解释。其次，它将确定搜索和直销壁垒对社会经济群体零售价格差异的影响，在一个特别干净的环境中，没有常见的混淆因素，如支付风险的差异。这一裁决反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Many U.S. states opened residential electricity markets to competition from for-profit companies between 1996 and 2007. Prior to this time, most households in the same town or city paid the same price for electricity. Under competition, some households pay prices triple the prices of other households in their same town or city, and households in low-income neighborhoods and vulnerable communities tend to pay particularly high prices. This research will investigate why low-income households tend to pay more than other households in a few Northeast U.S. electricity markets. Among other reasons, it will explore the role of door-to-door and other in-person marketing that is targeted at certain geographic areas or communities. The project aims to help improve policy and reduce inequality by analyzing the potential benefits and costs of additional consumer protection policies.This research will analyze distributional impacts of retail electricity restructuring. In particular, it will explore the hypothesis that heterogeneous barriers to search and costly in-person marketing create a dual market where firms price discriminate on consumers’ barriers to search. Firms may achieve this by offering low prices online for consumers who search and directly marketing higher prices to consumers who do not search. The project team will conduct a survey and randomized information intervention of 1,000 households in Maryland and Connecticut. The survey aims to answer two research questions: 1. Why do households sign up with direct marketers at high prices when lower prices exist? 2. Why do low-income households sign up for electricity products at higher prices, on average, than high-income households? The randomized information intervention will enable analysis of how search, switching, and price outcomes change with reductions in search costs and biases about the benefits of searching. The survey will also explore differences across sociodemographic groups in preferences for bundled attributes, inertia, search costs, belief biases, and perceptions of electricity marketers. It is important to differentiate between these mechanisms since they have differing implications for welfare and policy prescriptions. This research aims to build on existing literature on unexplained consumer decision error in residential electricity markets by identifying the key drivers of this decision error and exploring strategic firm response in this context. In addition, this project may contribute to the broader economic literature in two ways. First, it will assess a new explanation for price dispersion. Second, it will identify the impact of barriers to search and direct marketing on retail price differences across socioeconomic groups in a particularly clean setting that is free from common confounders, such as differences in payment risk.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.