In addition, the project examines how communication affects the role of visibility in these chains. Using a novel application of the classic Beer Game from operations research, the project introduces a resilience-adapted laboratory experiment to examine emergency supply chains as a public budgeting problem under uncertainty. The experiment models emergency supply chains as a network of queues in which limited visibility amplifies uncertainty, delays, and coordination failures across tiers. Increased visibility reduces inefficiencies in resource allocation under limited information by improving demand signal transmission, lowering order variability, and improving coordination across supply chain tiers. This mechanism motivates the hypothesis that increasing supply chain visibility reduces demand and service variability across tiers, which in turn shortens the duration of supply shortages at the end user tier. However, when information exceeds the processing capacity of subjects, it can induce cognitive overload and impair decision-making. Visibility determines what information subjects can observe, while communication shapes how they interact. Communication is expected to weaken the marginal benefit of increasing visibility when visibility is high, while enhancing its marginal benefit when visibility is low. The experimental data will be analyzed using Accelerated Failure Time (AFT) models, such as semiparametric or Cox proportional hazard models, to evaluate the timing of supply shortage resolution. The expected tangible outcome of this research is experimentally grounded evidence on how information and coordination environments shape resource allocation. This evidence will inform actionable guidance for public budgeting and finance institutions involved in disaster response, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Department of Defense (DoD).

To examine this, firms' economic resilience is quantified using established resilience metrics grounded in economic production theory. The empirical analysis utilizes an international multilingual survey of 193 firms in critical material sectors, including small arms munitions and strategic metals and minerals. The empirical strategy employs a three-step latent class analysis to uncover latent vulnerability. The results reveal that a higher number of alternative suppliers is inversely related to firm resilience. Results show that resilience is significantly enhanced when firms operate between an oligopolistic input market and a competitive output market; firms in this type of market structure also experience greater cost-effectiveness for the resilience tactics they use.

But this literature has unfortunately focused almost exclusively on other units of analysis, including communities, regions, firms, and supply chains. This paper provides the first integrative approach for the empirical quantification of resilience at the level of the household. It adapts and applies recent pathbreaking approaches for quantifying resilience metrics using economic production theory, which were originally developed for firms, and it applies them to households using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). Beyond this, the paper makes an additional contribution by integrating DEA with an approach for quantifying resilience metric components (e.g., avoided losses, maximum potential losses) for households, as standard measures of economic output or sales revenue that are often applied at the level of the firm or supply chain are inapplicable at the level of the household. It does this by integrating multi-attribute utility theory (MAUT) with DEA. The novel integrative approach is applied to a case of resilience quantification of Navajo households affected by long-duration electric power disruptions. The approach presented here is adaptable and generalizable to any other household resilience application.

Administrative and regulatory challenges exist because public managers are required to balance an open and competitive marketplace while confronting multiple market failures (e.g., consumer inattention, imperfect competition) alongside organizational, management, and legal and regulatory enforcement challenges. There are real-world consequences of administrative choices on economic (in)efficiency and consumer equity. Intended for public managers, this paper provides a comprehensive review of the public management challenges and opportunities in deregulated retail electricity markets. It then provides a review of empirical research and an empirical example for one category of these challenges—consumer equity. The paper concludes with a multi-disciplinary discussion of the role of public managers in deregulated marketplaces and public policy options to address both equity and efficiency challenges. 

Retail choice markets allow consumers to shop for electricity among competing suppliers, and we design a comprehensive study of household consumers that includes in-depth interviews, utility bill reviews, and a controlled conjoint experiment combining rating and choice-based approaches. We explore how preferences for attributes such as monthly fees, price per kilowatt-hour, and contract type vary by income, consumption, and market engagement, the latter of which is quantified by a novel composite measure of behavioral engagement constructed from multiple interview responses. The results show that individuals are most hesitant toward monthly fees (WTP: $-2.04 cents per kilowatt-hour) and variable rates (WTP: $-1.33 cents) while being willing to pay extra for renewable energy (WTP: $0.98 cents). Assuming that market literacy drives these differences in preferences, we use factor analysis to construct an individual-level measure of market literacy. We find that individuals with above-median market literacy are more willing to pay to avoid variable pricing (WTP: $-1.60 cents) than those with below-median market literacy (WTP: $-1.14 cents), a difference that is statistically significant. Through latent class analysis, we identify three underlying consumer types. Preliminary results suggest that individuals who actively shop but lack knowledge of generation costs are the most hesitant toward variable rate contracts (WTP: $-1.81 cents). To further examine tradeoffs between price and key non-price attributes, we estimate three-way interaction models to capture heterogeneity across customer types and income groups. Contract type exhibits a significant average interaction with price and additional heterogeneous effects across customer types and income groups. While individuals on the default utility service and higher-income individuals are less likely to choose variable-rate options even when prices are favorable, they exhibit greater price sensitivity. These findings suggest that individuals who are more engaged in the market and have greater knowledge exhibit a stronger aversion to variable-rate contracts, and this aversion ultimately dominates the price effect.