PowerWeb testing of various auction clearing mechanisms for electricity

Testing auction mechanisms using humans in a controlled environment provides an excellent and inexpensive means for evaluating their relative merits. This paper describes a framework for testing the efficacy of various supply-side auctions including one with price-responsive load and a soft-cap market. These are compared to a nonuniform price discriminative auction also inappropriately termed a "pay-as-bid" auction. Experimental evidence to date based on uniform price market testing has shown an ability of price responsive load to mitigate high volatility and average price.