To manage the peak load by demand response, time-of-use (TOU) pricing with hourly and seasonal adjustments has been applied in industrial and commercial sectors in Shanghai. However, the requirement of continuous production and exogenous output level might be a serious barrier for responding to TOU price, as these are different across industrial sectors, firm scale or even seasons. Thus, the extent to which heterogeneous firms respond to price signals is still ambiguous and worthy of exploration. Based on a regression discontinuity approach, we disentangle the firm-level effects of TOU pricing for industrial and commercial firms. While the overall result shows a nonsignificant average response to TOU pricing, the firm-level analysis concerning individual heterogeneity indicates that smaller firms are much more sensitive to TOU pricing than larger firms. Moreover, this effect is much more significant in the commercial sector. This study expands understanding of the heterogeneous effects of TOU pricing with consideration of firm-level information and fills the gap between different estimation results from the previous literature. The results also indicate a price policy failure and unbalanced effects on industrial and commercial firms.

为了通过需求响应来管理高峰负荷，上海的工商业采用了按小时和季节性调整的使用时间（TOU）定价。但是，连续生产和外来产出水平的需求可能是响应TOU价格的严重障碍，因为在不同行业，公司规模甚至季节之间，这都是不同的。因此，异构公司对价格信号的响应程度仍然是模棱两可的，值得探索。基于回归不连续性方法，我们对工业和商业公司的TOU定价在公司层面的影响进行了分解。虽然总体结果表明，对分时电价的平均响应不显着，公司关于个体异质性的分析表明，小公司对分时在线定价比大公司更敏感。而且，这种影响在商业领域更为重要。这项研究通过考虑公司层面的信息来扩展对TOU定价异质性影响的理解，并填补了先前文献中不同估计结果之间的空白。结果还表明价格政策失灵以及对工商业公司的不平衡影响。