Organizing a century of legal principles to help the U.S. public utility industry resolve tensions created by the current legal boundaries of legal regulation and fashion new policies for the future. Its mix of case narratives and doctrine, drawn from all legal sources, is geared to lawyers and non-lawyers, veterans and novices, practitioners and decision-makers, academics and the media--anyone seeking to use the law to serve the public interest. Topics covered include market structure, pricing, and jurisdictional issues.

What happens when electric utility monopolies pursue their acquisition interests—undisciplined by competition, and insufficiently disciplined by the regulators responsible for replicating competition? Since the mid-1980s, mergers and acquisitions of U.S. electric utilities have halved the number of local, independent utilities. Mostly debt-financed, these transactions have converted retiree-suitable investments into subsidiaries of geographically scattered conglomerates. Written by one of the U.S.’s leading regulatory thinkers, this book combines legal, accounting, economic and financial analysis of the 30-year march of U.S. electricity mergers with insights from the dynamic field of behavioral economics.

This book is distilled from articles presented at two seminars held at Rutgers -- The State University of New Jersey on October 25, 1991, and May 1, 1992, entitled 'Economic Innovations in Public Utility Regulations'. These contributions represent the best new research on various topics in public utility regulation, including topics in antitrust law, the environmental impact of public utility regulation, incentive regulation, price-cap regulation, and contractual relationships.