The problem that we address in this paper stems from the trend to delegation in the water management field. It refers to the municipality's negotiating disadvantage in the face of cartelized water management firms that makes delegation, once undertaken, virtually irreversible. We show why the...

This paper uses standard methods in stochastic calculus to measure the cost of the agency conflict that pits elected officials of French municipalities against the communities they represent in the management of the water supply. Under the French legal code, the municipalities are responsible...