Electricity supply: Corruption and reliability

Electricity provision requires the combination of successive services into a bundle to be supplied to final consumers: power generation itself, electricity transmission, voltage and frequency control, and the sequence of tasks designated to ensure the necessary reliability. Because of these characteristics, it is considered to be a common pool resource (CPR) that has rival and non-excludable characteristics. Electricity provision is a rival good because individual consumption has an impact on the quantity available to the residual demand; it can also be considered non-excludable due to the difficulty in excluding those that do not pay for the service provided. Exploring the CPR features of electricity supply, Jacquelyn Pless from the University of Oxford, UK, and Harrison Fell from North Carolina State University, USA, evaluate the impact of bribes to secure electricity connection on the reliability of electric power supply.