arXiv subjects

Nikolas Koumpis

Publications and source records attributed to Nikolas Koumpis.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Restoring Incentive Compatibility in Two-Stage Energy Markets with Prosumers

A central challenge in modern energy market design is the formulation of a strategy-proof imbalance settlement layer that secures both the economic efficiency of the institution and the stability of the power grid. Public data reveals that the day-ahead market is strategically biased below actual consumer demand. Such empirical observations are explained by active prosumers which provide implementable incentives for demand under-reporting. Active prosumers buy energy in the day-ahead market and sell energy in the real-time market for balancing real-time energy deviations. By under-reporting their demand for the day ahead they inflate real-time imbalances and, under uniform pricing, they dispatch their generation assets more profitably. We model the two-stage institution under linear preferences and benchmark it against its associated competitive equilibria. We show that although consumers' incentives for demand under-reporting vanish when the day-ahead market scales, prosumers' incentives remain lower bounded by a positive gain which depends only on the real-time market generation stack and their shares over it. To restore incentive compatibility under the existing informational constraints, we design a leave-one-out contrastive scoring rule-based penalty that is implemented by the day-ahead market operator, incentivizes prosumers to report their demand truthfully and ensures small charges when participating honestly. We illustrate these results with numerical simulations on synthetic data and evaluate our mechanism on real-market data by first rationalizing demand reports as subjective equilibria of the induced game. Our mechanism demonstrates strong incentive alignment while retaining a low cost for honest participation.

cs.GT↗

arXiv2024

A Distributionally Robust Estimator that Dominates the Empirical Average

We leverage the duality between risk-averse and distributionally robust optimization (DRO) to devise a distributionally robust estimator that strictly outperforms the empirical average for all probability distributions with negative excess kurtosis. The aforesaid estimator solves the $χ^{2}-$robust mean squared error problem in closed form.

math.ST↗

arXiv2022

State-Output Risk-Constrained Quadratic Control of Partially Observed Linear Systems

We propose a methodology for performing risk-averse quadratic regulation of partially observed Linear Time-Invariant (LTI) systems disturbed by process and output noise. To compensate against the induced variability due to both types of noises, state regulation is subject to two risk constraints. The latter renders the resulting controller cautious of stochastic disturbances, by restricting the statistical variability, namely, a simplified version of the cumulative expected predictive variance of both the state and the output. Our proposed formulation results in an optimal risk-averse policy that preserves favorable characteristics of the classical Linear Quadratic (LQ) control. In particular, the optimal policy has an affine structure with respect to the minimum mean square error (mmse) estimates. The linear component of the policy regulates the state more strictly in riskier directions, where the process and output noise covariance, cross-covariance, and the corresponding penalties are simultaneously large. This is achieved by "inflating" the state penalty in a systematic way. The additional affine terms force the state against pure and cross third-order statistics of the process and output disturbances. Another favorable characteristic of our optimal policy is that it can be pre-computed off-line, thus, avoiding limitations of prior work. Stability analysis shows that the derived controller is always internally stable regardless of parameter tuning. The functionality of the proposed risk-averse policy is illustrated through a working example via extensive numerical simulations.

math.OC↗