TRANSCRIPT Environmental Insights Guest: Record Date: Posting Date: - Hunt Allcott:

So, then the question is, if you went to real-time pricing, how would that affect and potentially increase market efficiency? And so part of that calculation was a randomized experiment that I evaluated where some consumers were exposed to real-time prices and you can estimate the demand elasticity, and then we connected that to a model of wholesale markets that incorporated several factors. [...] Well, another graduate of the PhD in public policy at Harvard, I think it was in one of the essays, in his thesis, he actually looked at what are the factors, what are the characteristics of corporations that explain which ones go beyond the required threshold in pollution emissions reductions, and actually sacrifice profits in the social interest, as one might refer to it. [...] So the idea being when you go to the car lot to buy a car or you go to the store to buy an air conditioner, you're not thinking about the fact that in addition to the purchase price of this thing, you're also going to have to buy the electricity or gasoline for this good that you're buying. [...] And so that had been in the discussion since the '70s, both in the policy discussion and in the academic discussion. [...] That leads me to think about a development that is taking place in the policy world, and I think you've seen the change and being in California, this has been happening for a while, and that is that both in the policy world and in the scholarly world of economics, certainly, there's been a tremendous increase in attention to what economists have long referred to as distributional concerns, as oppo.