Increasing-block prices are common in markets for water, cellular phone service, and retail electricity. This study estimates demand models under block prices and conducts a Monte Carlo experiment to test the small-sample bias of structural and instrumental variables (IV) estimators. We estimate...

Water is an increasingly scarce resource. It is often distributed such that consumers do not face any marginal cost of consumption, creating a common pool problem. For instance, tenants in multi-family buildings can often consume both hot and cold water at zero marginal cost. Using...

When consumption of water and other utilities is measured collectively and payment for such services is equally shared among members of the group, individuals may use more than what is socially optimal. In this paper, we evaluate how installation of individual meters affects water consumption....

This paper studies consumers' choice between two different water tariffs. We document a large inaction in a novel setting where customers face a binary decision and receive simple, detailed and personalized information about the financial savings they would obtain if they were to switch water...

We develop a framework to analyze urban water tariff setting and its welfare implications and apply it to a panel of cities in the People's Republic of China in the 2000s. First, we find that peer cities' water tariff levels have a significant influence on a city's choice of tariffs. We use the...

The effectiveness of price as a water conservation measure remains an open empirical issue and relevant policy question. We conduct a meta-regression analysis that summarizes 615 estimates of the price elasticity of residential water demand, from 124 econometric studies. Large-sample studies...

We study the response of residential water demand to nonlinear prices by exploiting a natural experiment arising from a water pricing reform in a major Chinese city. The reform introduced an unconventional Increasing Block Tariff featuring prices set according to annual cumulative consumption...

The water prices that implement the optimal water policy are derived. These prices contain the supply cost components and two shadow price terms: one reflecting the in situ value of natural water and the other representing the scarcity of recycled water. The former accounts for the scarcity,...

We study adoption by more than 150,000 households of an optional transitional water tariff implemented in the South-East of England in conjunction with an universal metering pro-gramme. We document how inertia leads customers to relinquish substantial financial gains, with less than a third of...