What drives consumers to switch retailers? Evidence from the Alberta electricity market
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study examines consumer switching behaviour in Alberta’s retail electricity market, focusing on the impact of rate volatility, income, education, and age on search rates and product premia. The analysis reveals significant consumer inertia, with many customers remaining on default rate even when competitive alternatives offer lower rates. Higher electricity rates were found to significantly increase search activity and switching rates. Contrary to expectations, consumers living in higher-income and higher-educated areas more often made less cost-effective choices, often opting for the more expensive default rate, called the Regulated Rate Option (RRO). Consumers living in lower-income areas, despite being presumptively more price-sensitive, also showed a preference for the RRO, indicating potential market misjudgment. The findings highlight the importance of consumer information to foster a more competitive and efficient market, as many consumers appear to make non-cost-minimizing or suboptimal switching decisions, particularly during periods of rapid rate increases. • Examination of consumer switching behaviour in Alberta’s retail electricity market. • There is significant consumer inertia but rate shocks cause consumers to search. • Consumers in high-income and high-education areas often do not cost minimize. • A variety of consumer groups place a premium on the regulated default product. • The findings highlight the importance of consumer information.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".