This paper proposes a novel mechanism for reallocating temporary water flows or permanent water rights. The All-in-Auction (AiA) increases efficiency and social welfare by reallocating water without harming water rights holders. AiAs can be used to allocate variable or diminished flows among...

This paper explores the economic and political dimensions of responding to water scarcity by increasing supply rather than reducing demand with examples from San Diego (US), Almeria (ES) and Riyadh (SA). Each case explains how leaders benefit by obscuring the costs of desalinated supplies. In...

Our non-representative sample of 245 undergraduates had significantly lower scores on questions presented in the standard heterogeneous form (i.e., Direct Demand equation and Inverse Demand graph) than on questions presented in non-standard homogenous forms. This result, which holds for advanced...

Water utilities need to improve their performance in ways that are transparent and obvious to customers. David Zetland explains how performance insurance can improve outcomes for customers, ease the workload on regulators, and reward good managers

Increasing water scarcity has attracted more businesses and their high-powered market tools to a sector that has been dominated historically by organizations operating under low-powered incentives. This paper compares business and bureaucratic institutions through three interfaces. The first...

Dutch drinking water companies now deliver safe affordable water to the entire population, but this result was not planned. It emerged, rather, from an evolutionary process in which various pressures on the commons resulted in changes to drinking water systems that addressed old concerns but...

International aid travels from donor to recipient through a chain of middlemen. Middlemen play two roles: as agents delivering aid and as principals monitoring other middlemen delivering aid. As the quality of middlemen falls, shirking (theft) increases, and aid effectiveness falls. While...

Bilateral or multilateral organizations control about 90% of official overseas development assistance (ODA), much of which is wasted. This note traces aid failure to the daisy chain of principal-agent-beneficiary relationships linking rich donors to aid bureaucrats to poor recipients. Waste...

Economic theories and tools provide only partial insight into the many complexities affecting various uses and flows of water. To usefully teach water economics, it is therefore necessary to understand and cooperate with other disciplines. Many economic concepts can be used to understand...

In 1992, Amsterdam's voters pushed for a more-aggressive autoluw (`nearly car free'') policy, but progress has been slow. Hourly parking tariffs are the highest in the country, but more cars than ever park in Amsterdam. We explore this promise-results gap in a spatial comparison of the price of...