“…While existing literature has explored the strategic behavior of RE in the context of market equilibrium, it has primarily been confined to strategic pricing, often formulated within a bilevel modeling framework that includes an upper-level RE profit maximization model and a lowerlevel market clearing model (Ruiz et al, 2012;Kazempour and Zareipour, 2014;Hartwig and Kockar, 2016;Zou et al, 2016;Heredia et al, 2018;Wang et al, 2018;Guo et al, 2020;Huang et al, 2021;Dai et al, 2022;Naemi et al, 2022;Wang et al, 2022;Zhang et al, 2023a;Zhang et al, 2023b). Commonly, the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditions (Kazempour et al, 2012;Zeynali et al, 2022) are employed to recast the bilevel problem into a single-level nonlinear framework, namely a mathematical problem with equilibrium constraints (MPEC) (Guo et al, 2020).…”