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

经济学博士论文研究：直接营销作为住宅电力选择市场中价格歧视的一种形式

• 批准号: 2217111
• 负责人: Meredith Fowlie
• 金额: $ 1.19万
• 依托单位: University of California-Berkeley
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2022
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2022-08-01 至 2023-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2217111&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; Economics; Direct

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.

美国许多州在1996年至2007年之间从营利性公司开放了居民的电力市场。在此期间，同一城镇或城市的大多数家庭为电力支付相同的价格。在竞争中，一些家庭为同一城镇或城市中其他家庭的价格支付三倍，低收入社区和弱势社区的家庭往往要支付特别高的价格。这项研究将调查为什么低收入家庭在美国东北部电力市场中倾向于比其他家庭支付更多的费用。除其他原因外，它将探讨针对某些地理区域或社区的挨家挨户和其他面对面营销的作用。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并减少不平等。这项研究将分析零售电力恢复的分配影响。特别是，它将探讨以下假设：搜索和昂贵的面对面营销的异质障碍创造了一个双重市场，使公司价格歧视消费者的搜索障碍。企业可以通过在网上为搜索和直接向不搜索的消费者销售更高价格的消费者提供低价来实现这一目标。项目团队将对马里兰州和康涅狄格州的1,000户家庭进行调查和随机信息干预。该调查旨在回答两个研究问题：1。当价格较低时，家庭为什么以高价直接与营销人员签约？ 2。为什么低收入家庭平均比高收入家庭以更高的价格注册电产品？随机信息干预将使搜索，切换和价格结果如何随着搜索成本的降低以及搜索收益的偏见而进行分析。该调查还将探索社会人口统计学群体之间的差异，以捆绑属性，惯性，搜索成本，信念偏见和对电力营销人员的看法。重要的是要区分这些机制，因为它们对福利和政策处方有区别。这项研究旨在通过确定此决策错误的关键驱动因素并在这种情况下探索战略性固件响应来建立有关住宅电力市场中意外的消费者决策错误的现有文献。此外，该项目可能通过两种方式为更广泛的经济文献做出贡献。首先，它将评估价格分散的新解释。其次，它将确定搜索和直接营销对社会经济群体之间零售价差异的影响，在一个特别干净的环境中，没有共同的混杂因素，例如支付风险的差异。该奖项反映了NSF的法定任务，并被认为是通过基金会的知识分子和更广泛的影响审查的评估来通过评估来获得支持的珍贵。