International power trade as a sequence of repeated bargaining games

Abstract

International electricity spot trade between two countries is modeled as a sequence of bargaining games, one for each trade opportunity. Each game has a benefit per time unit and random duration. There is a correspondence between this trade game and the bargaining game for the partition of a pie studied by Rubinstein. If the game admits the possibility of “money burning”, actions by a player to destroy surplus to punish the other player’s rejection of an offer, each game admits multiple inefficient perfect Nash equilibria, with delay in the partition. Conditions are found for the existence of predefined agreements between the players, sustaining efficient immediate partition in each game, as an alternative to inefficient Nash equilibria in the sequence of games.