Building on Oliver Williamson’s original analysis, the contributors introduce new ideas, different perspectives and provide tools for better understanding changes in the approach to regulation, the reform of public utilities, and the complex problems of governance. They draw largely upon...

This extensive, state-of-the-art Handbook provides a comprehensive overview of the various experiences of liberalization across different sectors, regions and disciplines.

This comprehensive volume provides a state-of-the-art overview of regulatory economics and reviews the main theories, tools, and domains of regulation

From 1998 to 2005, the German transmission grid has been put under a self-regulated arrangement. It seems hard to believe that transmission lines can be opened to "third-party access" only with a "negotiated access regime" and no regulator supervision. It seems contradictory with the notion of...

This paper analyzes the success of wind energy in Spain from 1986 to 2007. Certain special characteristics have emerged in Spain that provide credibility to the feed-in tariff (FIT) device to promote this energy source. To explain this success, the analysis will focus on the intrinsic...

In the early 1990s, Pablo Spiller worked on North and Williamson's application of the New Institutional Economics, on the conditions of credible network reforms. Credibility is defined as the capacity to provide reform commitments. This work, started from a Positive Political Economics Veto...

This paper proposes a support mechanism for energy storage devices for island power systems where intermittent renewable generation is rapidly growing. We base our proposal on the maturity level of storage devices (Chen et al., 2009 [7]) and on the linear model for the development of innovations...

This paper presents a geographic dimension not often studied in the dynamics of creating an internal market for electricity within the European Union, namely the case of small European electricity systems like those found on the Greek islands of Cyprus and Crete. Our question, then, is how to...