PIPages
Labs

Andrew Sweeting

University of Maryland, MD·Social Science

Some products need several separate suppliers, each providing a different part. In those cases, every supplier holds some power over price, and that can raise costs along the whole supply chain.

Fields

Social Science

Mathematics & Statistics

Topics

industrial organization

market power

supply chains

Grants
1 known grant, through May 2028

What they work on

  1. Measure how shocks to electricity demand, generating costs, coal mining and railroads pass through to coal and transport prices, using reduced-form econometrics on confidential shipment and purchase data, interpreted with Cournot and Spulber models.
  2. Estimate a static structural model of the coal supply chain and power plant output to quantify supplier and downstream market power and simulate subsidy changes and industry consolidation.
  3. Test whether coal and transport prices reflect efforts to influence future market structure, such as delaying coal plant retirements, using a dynamic model and stylized counterfactual simulations.

More about the research

Coal-fired electricity is a clear example: power plants need both coal from mines and railroad transport to move it. This project studies how efficient the U.S. coal supply chain has been over the past thirty years, when complementary suppliers like these may have market power.

Why it matters

Coal supply chains that link mines, railroads and power plants shape electricity costs. Measuring how market power among complementary suppliers affected efficiency, and simulating subsidies for non-fossil energy, mergers and plant retirements, could inform regulators and policymakers on energy markets and competition. The methods could also be applied to other industries.

Known grants

From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.

Complementarity and Market Power in Electricity Supply Chains

NSF · Jun 2025 – May 2028

Closest labs

Agostino Capponi

Columbia University, NY·Engineering

Develop a dynamic decision-making framework, using dynamic games and network theory, that quantifies trade-offs between routine efficiency and resilience to supply and demand shocks in supply chain networks.

Robert Johnson

University of Notre Dame, IN·Social Science

Model how occasionally binding capacity limits in supply chains shift domestic and import price Phillips Curves and fuel inflation, using a multisector open-economy New Keynesian model.

Christian Zlolniski

University of Texas at Arlington, TX·Social Science

Document labor arrangements and working conditions in artisanal and small-scale mining that supplies natural resources for sustainably branded products.

The school

University of Maryland: 49 labs on PI Pages, $1.5B a year on research, 602 research doctorates a year.

More about University of Maryland

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