Resource Allocation in Electricity Markets with Budget Constrained Customers

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Perkins, Lila, Zhang, Baosen
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Perkins, Lila
Zhang, Baosen
author_facet Perkins, Lila
Zhang, Baosen
contents In electricity markets, customers are increasingly constrained by their budgets. A budget constraint for a user is an upper bound on the price multiplied by the quantity. However, since prices are determined by the market equilibrium, the budget constrained welfare maximization problem is difficult to define rigorously and to work with. In this letter, we show that a natural dual-ascent algorithm converges to a unique competitive equilibrium under budget constraints. Further, this budget-constrained equilibrium is exactly the solution of a convex welfare maximization problem in which each user's utility is replaced by a modified utility that splices the original utility with a logarithmic function where the budget binds. We also provide an explicit piecewise construction of this modified utility and demonstrate the results on examples with quadratic and square root utility functions.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_20277
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Resource Allocation in Electricity Markets with Budget Constrained Customers
Perkins, Lila
Zhang, Baosen
Computer Science and Game Theory
Systems and Control
In electricity markets, customers are increasingly constrained by their budgets. A budget constraint for a user is an upper bound on the price multiplied by the quantity. However, since prices are determined by the market equilibrium, the budget constrained welfare maximization problem is difficult to define rigorously and to work with. In this letter, we show that a natural dual-ascent algorithm converges to a unique competitive equilibrium under budget constraints. Further, this budget-constrained equilibrium is exactly the solution of a convex welfare maximization problem in which each user's utility is replaced by a modified utility that splices the original utility with a logarithmic function where the budget binds. We also provide an explicit piecewise construction of this modified utility and demonstrate the results on examples with quadratic and square root utility functions.
title Resource Allocation in Electricity Markets with Budget Constrained Customers
topic Computer Science and Game Theory
Systems and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.20277