Academics and policymakers generally agree that energy infrastructure should be subject to price regulation. More and more critics of modern regulatory approaches, however, point to the apparent failures of these mechanisms to achieve competitive pricing in practice. Some have suggested that customers ought to be involved in the regulatory process, but it is uncertain how customers' perspectives can best be incorporated. In this study, we evaluate how electoral competition influences monopoly pricing by extending well-known regulatory laboratory experiments. We show that electoral competition has a significant and negative impact on prices. This effect disappears when electoral competition is implemented jointly with incentive regulation, implying substitutability rather than complementarity of regulation and electoral competition.

学术界和政策制定者普遍认为，能源基础设施应该受到价格监管。然而，越来越多的现代监管方法的批评者指出，这些机制在实践中显然无法实现有竞争力的定价。一些人建议客户应该参与监管过程，但不确定如何最好地纳入客户的观点。在这项研究中，我们通过扩展著名的监管实验室实验来评估选举竞争如何影响垄断定价。我们表明选举竞争对价格有显着的负面影响。This effect disappears when electoral competition is implemented jointly with incentive regulation, implying substitutability rather than complementarity of regulation and electoral competition.