EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Household water savings and response to dynamic incentives under nonlinear pricing

Li Li and Marc Jeuland

Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, 2023, vol. 119, issue C

Abstract: 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 and a bimonthly billing cycle. Analyzing data from a household survey and administrative water bills, we detect a small effect on low-use households but find large water savings among high-use households. Moreover, we find strong evidence that high-use households respond to future price while current price remains fixed, and that the small share of households who appear myopic do not respond to dynamic incentives.

Keywords: Nonlinear pricing; Increasing block tariff; Dynamic incentives; Water saving; Household water demand (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D12 L95 L98 Q21 Q25 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0095069623000293
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jeeman:v:119:y:2023:i:c:s0095069623000293

DOI: 10.1016/j.jeem.2023.102811

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Environmental Economics and Management is currently edited by M.A. Cole, A. Lange, D.J. Phaneuf, D. Popp, M.J. Roberts, M.D. Smith, C. Timmins, Q. Weninger and A.J. Yates

More articles in Journal of Environmental Economics and Management from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-23
Handle: RePEc:eee:jeeman:v:119:y:2023:i:c:s0095069623000293