Abstract
Anecdotal evidence indicates that electricity producers use production failures to disguise strategic reductions of capacity in order to influence prices, but systematic evidence is lacking. We use an instrumental variables approach and data from the Swedish energy market to examine such behavior. In a market without strategic withholding, the decision of report a failure should be independent of the market price. We show that marginal producers base the decision to report a failure, in part, on prices, which indicates that failures are a result of economic incentives as well as technical problems.