We compare the behavior and welfare effects of two popular interventions for resource conservation. The first intervention is social comparison reports (SC), which primarily provide consumers with information motivating behavioral change. The second intervention is real-time feedback (RTF),...

Common resources may be managed with inefficient policies for the sake of equity. We study how rationing the commons shapes the efficiency and equity of resource use, in the context of agricultural groundwater use in Rajasthan, India. We find that rationing binds on input use, such that farmers,...

Social interactions are widely understood to influence consumer decisions in many choice settings. This paper identifies causal peer effects in water conservation during the growing season, utilizing variation from consumer migration. We use machine learning to classify high-resolution remote...

Water use and electricity use, which generate negative environmental externalities, are susceptible to a second externality problem: with household-level billing, each person enjoys private benefits of consumption but shares the cost with other household members. If individual usage is...

We estimate the price elasticity of water demand with household-level data, structurally modeling the piecewise-linear budget constraints imposed by increasing-block pricing. We develop a mathematical expression for the unconditional price elasticity of demand under increasing-block prices and...

The efficiency properties of price and non-price instruments for conservation in environmental policy are well understood. Yet, there is little evidence comparing the effectiveness of these instruments, especially when considering water resource management. We exploit a rich panel of residential...

This paper exploits the seasonal and annual changes in marginal prices for water to estimate the price elasticity of demand by residential households for water. It uses the changes in distributions of water using the census block group levels in response to changes in marginal prices of water...

This paper formulates and estimates a household-level, billing-cycle water demand model under increasing block prices that accounts for the impact of monthly weather variation, the amount of vegetation on the household's property, and customer-level heterogeneity in demand due to household...