Informal Report to National Science Foundation: Research on Stackelberg Games and Electricity Pricing

摘要

Three papers on Stackelberg games and electricity pricing are presented. In the first paper, a complete solution for the two-person, deterministic Stackelberg game is developed. The problem is separated into three tractable subproblems: an optimization problem with equality constraints, a minimax problem, and an optimization problem with an inequality constraint. Sufficient and necessary conditions for the existence of hierarchical equilibrium strategies are derived. In the second paper, sufficient and necessary conditions for single-stage, partially nested, stochastic games are presented and the effect of more information in the presence of uncertainties is considered. In the third paper, different electricity pricing schemes are analyzed from a game theoretic point of view. A philosophy, termed load adaptive pricing, in which supply and demand respond to each other through prices and consumption, and the utility company sells power at real time rates, is introduced.