A study on consumer switching behavior with a matching problem in electricity markets

This paper analyzes consumers' benefit, which is the monetary gain delivered to consumers, in a matching problem on transactions of electricity between suppliers and consumers. A previous study has dealt with a social welfare maximization problem to find a matching on an electricity market model. That problem, however, does not involve a solution of the matching in which all consumers can gain benefit. In order to raise the number of consumers who can make benefit, this paper presents a maximization problem of the minimum consumers' benefit. Simulation results have demonstrated that the proposed problem determines a better matching solution compared with the previous social welfare maximization problem in terms of the number of consumers obtaining benefit.