Study on the customer choice for electricity contract and relevant impact on the retail market

The introduction of smart meter technology and electricity retail tariffs plays an important role in the open electricity retail market, and the most widely used retail pricing in the current market is the Time-of-Use (ToU) Pricing tariffs. However, the diversity of TOU tariffs brings more complexity to the choices of electricity customers. Therefore, a retail ToU pricing tariff decision-making model based on customer satisfaction and neighbor influence from social network is proposed. The model first needs to extract features and create profiles for each customer, and establish a customer satisfaction model based on the electricity price tariff characteristics and customer characteristics, which comprehensively considers the satisfaction of customers in four dimensions: electricity consumption, electricity consumption habits, electricity expenditure, and household electrification degree. Secondly, using a small-world network model to simulate the information dissemina- tion process between customers, while considering the weight of neighbors’ opinions and prediction of the customer’s electricity demand response, a dynamic social interaction model is established. When customers come into tariff with new price information, they will evaluate their satisfaction with the new tariff and compare it with the original tariff, and simulate their decision-making behavior of whether to switch the tariff by setting two customer decision strategies. Under this model, customer decisions will be simulated which can change with customer inner satis- faction and social network influence, and the market share of different electricity price tariffs will also dynamically change accordingly.