Stability Analysis of Pricing Competition in Retail Electricity Market: On Impact of Bounded Rationality

This paper investigates retail competition in an electricity market with multiple retailers. After reviewing an existing Stackelberg game theoretic market model with a single retailer, we present a novel dynamical retail market model with two competitive retailers and multiple consumers. In the model, the process that consumers choose either of retailers to be contracted with is modeled by a discrete choice model, called logit model. We then analyze the equilibria of the dynamical system and their stability, mainly from the view point on how bounded rationality of the consumers affects the results. Finally, we verify the presented analytical results by bifurcation diagrams.