Testing the Joint Billing Effect Hypothesis

With the recent national emphasis on energy conservation, greater attention has been focused on the ability of natural gas and electric utilities to induce customers to alter their consumption habits through pricing policies. As a consequence, a great deal of research has been done recently aimed to measure residential households' consumption responses to changes in energy prices. One of the important unresolved issues arising from this research concerns the possible existence of a subset of households that, because of the way they purchase their energy inputs, behave differently from other households.