  Demand Response (DR) programs serve to reduce the consumption of electricity
at times when the supply is scarce and expensive. The utility informs the
aggregator of an anticipated DR event. The aggregator calls on a subset of its
pool of recruited agents to reduce their electricity use. Agents are paid for
reducing their energy consumption from contractually established baselines.
Baselines are counter-factual consumption estimates of the energy an agent
would have consumed if they were not participating in the DR program. Baselines
are used to determine payments to agents. This creates an incentive for agents
to inflate their baselines. We propose a novel self-reported baseline mechanism
(SRBM) where each agent reports its baseline and marginal utility. These
reports are strategic and need not be truthful. Based on the reported
information, the aggregator selects or calls on agents to meet the load
reduction target. Called agents are paid for observed reductions from their
self-reported baselines. Agents who are not called face penalties for
consumption shortfalls below their baselines. The mechanism is specified by the
probability with which agents are called, reward prices for called agents, and
penalty prices for agents who are not called. Under SRBM, we show that truthful
reporting of baseline consumption and marginal utility is a dominant strategy.
Thus, SRBM eliminates the incentive for agents to inflate baselines. SRBM is
assured to meet the load reduction target. SRBM is also nearly efficient since
it selects agents with the smallest marginal utilities, and each called agent
contributes maximally to the load reduction target. Finally, we show that SRBM
is almost optimal in the metric of average cost of DR provision faced by the
aggregator.
