Reliability of Drinking Water: Risk Perceptions and Economic Value
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper estimates the monetary value of drinking water supply reliability in Alberta, Canada. We use the results of an online stated preference survey that elicited respondents’ experiences with, and numerically expressed future risk perceptions of, three types of water outages: short-term outages, longer-term outages and boiled water advisories. Respondents with non-zero risk perceptions were presented with alternative programs that reduced these risks, but increased their water bills. Using cost and other program attributes as explanatory variables, we measured the probability of supporting the programs. The survey results indicated that respondents have not experienced many water outages in the last 10 years, but expect outages to be more frequent over the next 10 years. Using the sample of respondents with non-zero beliefs in the likelihood of future water outages, we calculated a mean willingness to pay (WTP) per household of $71 per year for at least a 50% reduction in the likelihood of a short-term water outage. Results from spike models using responses of all respondents, regardless of their expressed risk perceptions, indicate a WTP of $46 per year for at least a 50% reduction in the risk of short-term water outages. We also used a control function approach to control for potential endogeneity associated with the use of elicited perceived risks in the model and found small differences in WTP estimates. These values provide policy makers with quantified benefits that can be compared to investment costs in traditional water treatment or source water protection.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".