Are Solar Panels Commodities? Evidence of Quality Differences and Asymmetric Information

Abstract

Solar panels should not be considered commodities. Considerable quality differences, as measured directly by degradation of production over time, are found between manufacturers. I test two implications from the theory of asymmetric information of quality and find: (1) Solar power systems with high-information third-party owners display higher quality than host-owned systems. (2) Furthermore, with a 85% probability, the price of solar panels that are owned by high-information owners are more highly correlated to quality. Methodologically, the article demonstrates a novel application of Bayesian hierarchical regression models that are increasingly popular in operations research and the decision sciences.