A Decision-Making Framework for New Member Integration in Renewable Energy Communities under Prospect Theory
2026-06-29 • Computer Science and Game Theory
Computer Science and Game Theory
AI summaryⓘ
The authors study how to add a new member to an existing group sharing renewable energy. They use game theory to model long-term decisions like investing and pricing, and a special equilibrium approach for short-term daily scheduling. Their method considers that people have different preferences and may not always act perfectly rational, using prospect theory to capture this behavior. They tested their model on example communities and found that decision order and individual preferences strongly affect outcomes.
renewable energy communitygame theoryextensive-form gamegeneralized Nash equilibriumprospect theoryinvestmentenergy schedulingstakeholder preferencesbounded rationality
Authors
Louise Sadoine, Thomas Brihaye, Zacharie De Grève
Abstract
This paper introduces an original approach to an underexplored issue: the integration of a new member into an existing renewable energy community. The problem involves actions with both long-term consequences, such as investment and local pricing, and short-term operational ones, such as daily energy and financial flow management. Long-term decision-making is modeled using finite extensive-form game theory, while short-term day-ahead scheduling decisions are formulated as a generalized Nash equilibrium problem. This framework explicitly accounts for heterogeneous stakeholder preferences and bounded rationality, modeled through prospect theory. The proposed approach is flexible and general, making it applicable to various objectives and decision-making contexts in the evolving landscape of renewable energy communities. It is applied to two communities with five members, eleven candidate users, multiple preference configurations and a comparison with heuristic metrics from the literature is also addressed. The model also exhibits that equilibrium outcomes and stakeholder behavior are influenced by the order of decisions, their preference criteria, and prospect theory parameters particularly the reference point selection.