Beyond the frictionless machine : economic analysis of energy policy in an imperfect world
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Better understanding energy, how to harness and utilise it effectively, and what the implications of its use in these ways means from an individual to a more aggregate level are important topics for business, policy making, and research. Growing evidence pointing to the serious global consequences of society's energy usage further increases the importance of these goals. Furthermore it is increasingly clear that the costs and benefits of energy use are experienced disproportionately across the population. The changing nature of individual decision-making and how the actions of individuals affect an entire economic system also play important roles in our effort to implement effective energy and environmental policy. Both on the demand-side and the supply-side, trends of decentralisation and the increased adoption of more granular technologies are making it increasingly important to understand the role of the individual and their behaviour within the broader energy-economic-environmental system. This dissertation contributes to the intersection of the energy, environmental, and behavioural economics literatures with an emphasis on policy efficacy. It considers questions of efficient retail electricity pricing, externality-correcting policies, the role of behavioural bias in consumer decision making, and the implications of such bias for policy efficacy. Its approach is grounded in neoclassical economics, but it brings the newer field of behavioural economics into the fold where its inclusion strengthens the ability to answer the question at hand. There are two main projects in this dissertation. The first is an in-depth evaluation of the rooftop solar pricing policy of Net Energy Metering (NEM) from both an economic efficiency and distributional equity approach. Treatment of this topic is approached first theoretically and then complemented with a suite of numerical simulations. The second project represents an attempt to codify and unify considerations of behavioural bias in individual decision making and what implications they have for optimal policy efficacy. In this way it showcases behavioural economics as an extension of, rather than a challenge to, neoclassical theory.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2018; ©2018 |
| Publication date | 2018; 2018 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Craxton, Melanie |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Sweeney, James L |
| Thesis advisor | Sweeney, James L |
| Thesis advisor | Kolstad, Charles D |
| Thesis advisor | Weyant, John P. (John Peter) |
| Degree committee member | Kolstad, Charles D |
| Degree committee member | Weyant, John P. (John Peter) |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Management Science and Engineering. |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Melanie Craxton. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Management Science and Engineering. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2018. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2018 by Melanie Craxton
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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