Multiple-Profile Prediction-of-Use Games

Prediction-of-use (POU) games were developed by Vinyals et al. [4] to address the mismatch between the costs of energy suppliers and the incentives imposed on consumers by a fixed-rate electricity tariff. However, the POU games framework does not address the question of how consumers should coordinate to maximize social welfare. To address this, we develop an extension to POU games, which we term MPOU games, where agents report multiple acceptable electricity use profiles. We show that MPOU games have many of the same properties that make POU games attractive, e.g., convexity. Despite this, MPOU games introduce new incentive issues that prevent the consequences of convexity from being exploited directly, a problem we analyze and resolve. We validate our approach with experimental results using utility models learned from real electricity use data.