Spillover of international crude oil prices on China's refined oil wholesale prices and price forecasting:Daily-frequency data of private enterprises and local refineries

Compared with retail prices of state-owned companies used in almost all existing studies,China’s refined oil wholesale prices of private enterprises and local refineries are more affected by the market and better reflect the real supply-demand situation.For the first time,this paper applies own-monitored dailyfrequency wholesale prices of China’s private enterprises and local refineries during 2013-2020 to derive spillover effects of international crude oil prices on China’s refined oil prices through the VAR-BEKKGARCH(vector autoregression-Baba,Engle,Kraft,and Kroner-generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity)model,and then tries to forecast wholesale prices through the PCA-BP(principal component analysis-back propagation)neural network model.Results show that international crude oil prices have significant mean spillover and volatility spillover effects on China’s refined oil wholesale prices.Changes in crude oil prices are the Granger cause of changes in refined oil wholesale prices.With the improvement of China’s oil-pricing mechanism in 2016,the volatility spillover from the international crude oil market to China’s refined oil market gradually increases,and the BRENT price variation has an increasing impact on the refined oil wholesale price variation.The PCA-BP model could serve as a candidate tool for forecasting China’s refined oil wholesale prices.

How to Implement the Wholesale Price Contract: Considering Competition between Supply Chains

In this paper,we develop the price competition model of two supply chains,in which each supply chain includes one core manufacturer and one retailer,respectively.The manufacturer in each supply chain sells products to the retailer through a commonly-used wholesale price contract.Each manufacturer has two options to implement the wholesale price contract:playing the Stackelberg game with the retailer and playing the bargaining game with the retailer.Based on the manufacturer's two alternative performing modes in each supply chain,we consider four combined performing modes of two competitive supply chains in the model.By comparing equilibrium results,we find that when both manufacturers choose to bargain with retailers,the sales volume increases and the sales price decreases.Moreover,the manufacturers'mode option is affected by bargaining power,product quality level,and the cost of improving product quality.Specifically,when both bargaining power and the cost of improving product quality are relatively small,both manufacturers choose to play Stackelberg game with retailers.When manufacturers'bargaining power is sufficiently large,regardless of the cost of improving product quality,both manufacturers choose to bargain with retailers.Surprisingly,when the manufacturer chooses to bargain the wholesale price with the retailer,higher product quality is not always beneficial to the retailer because the retailer may have to share part of the cost of the manufacturer.

Investing and Pricing with Supply Uncertainty in Electricity Market:A General View Combining Wholesale and Retail Market

Renewable energy,such as wind and solar energy,may vary signifi cantly over time and locations depending on the weather and the climate conditions.This leads to the supply uncertainty in the electricity(power) market with renewable energy integrated to power grid.In this paper,electricity in the market is classified into two types:stablesupply electricity(SSE) and unstablesupply electricity(USE).We investigate the investment and pricing strategies under the electricity supply uncertainty in wholesale and retail electricity market.In particular,our model combines the wholesale and retail market and capture the dominant players,i.e.,consumers,power plant(power operator),and electricity supplier.To derive the market behaviors of these players,we formulate the market decision problems as a multistage Stackelberg game.By solving the game model,we obtain the optimal,with closedform,wholesale investment and retail pricing strategy for the operator.We also obtain the energy supplier's best price mechanism numerically under certain assumption.We fi nd the price of SSE being about 1.4 times higher than that of USE will benefi t energy supplieroptimally,under which power plant's optimal strategy of investing is to purchase USE about 4.5 times much more than SSE.

Effect of contract choice on upstream carbon emission reduction considering carbon taxation

In order to curb the manufacturer’s product carbon emission levels, the leading retailer usually offers three contracts to the manufacturer, i.e., wholesale-price contract(WC), cost-sharing contract(CC) and revenue-sharing contract(RC). The results of implementing the three contracts are discussed and compared. The results reveal that as long as the government levies carbon taxations, all the three contracts can effectively stimulate the manufacturer to invest in carbon emission reduction. Among the three contracts, RC can achieve the highest level of carbon emission reduction of products and the maximum profits for both the manufacturer and retailer in a supply chain. However, the RC fails to reach the level of the centralized supply chain(CSC), thus it cannot coordinate the supply chain. The supply chain members’ contract choices are consistent. Both members prefer RC to the other two contracts. In order to effectively reduce the manufacturer’s carbon emission levels, the government should impose the highest carbon taxation level under RC, the medium carbon taxation level under CC, the lowest carbon taxation level under WC, and the same carbon taxation level as RC under the CSC.

Demand Responsive Market Decision-Makings and Electricity Pricing Scheme Design in Low-Carbon Energy System Environment

The two-way interaction between smart grid and customers will continuously play an important role in enhan-cing the overall efficiency of the green and low-carbon electric power industry and properly accommodating intermittent renewable energy resources.Thus far,the existing electricity pricing mechanisms hardly match the technical properties of smart grid;neither can they facilitate increasing end users participating in the electri-city market.In this paper,several relevant models and novel methods are proposed for pricing scheme design as well as to achieve optimal decision-makings for market participants,in which the mechanisms behind are com-patible with demand response operation of end users in the smart grid.The electric vehicles and prosumers are jointly considered by complying with the technical constraints and intrinsic economic interests.Based on the demand response of controllable loads,the real-time pricing,rewarding pricing and insurance pricing methods are proposed for the retailers and their bidding decisions for the wholesale market are also presented to increase the penetration level of renewable energy.The proposed demand response oriented electricity pricing scheme can provide some useful operational references on the cooperative operation of controllable loads and renewable energy through the feasible retail and wholesale market pricing methods,and thereby enhancing the development of the low-carbon energy system.

COORDINATING A TWO-ECHELON SUPPLY CHAIN THROUGH DIFFERENT CONTRACTS UNDER PRICE AND PROMOTIONAL EFFORT-DEPENDENT DEMAND

Retail price and promotional effort are two important parameters on which demand of a commodity largely depends. This paper develops and analyzes a two-echelon supply chain where market demand depends on both retail price and sales effort. The centralized model is studied as the benchmark case, and the wholesale price-only contract is studied as the base case in which each entity tries to maximize its individual profit. Different contract mechanisms are implemented to outperform the base case in terms of both total chain＇s as well as individual profits. Comparisons among the coordinating contracts are provided so that any entity may choose the better one from available contracts after the contract parameters are negotiated. The model is extensively examined through a numerical example.