Pricing of water supply services: Consumer response to price structures
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This research empirically examines consumers' preferences for water services under different price structures and their willingness to pay (WTP) to avoid seasonal water use restrictions. According to the literature, consumers are not price sensitive and price response varies with the type of price structure. Existing literature is based on aggregate response to price structure and not actual consumer responses. In addition, in view of supply shortages utilities restrict outdoor activities. However, available information on water industry does not provide evidence on consumers' valuation of the service. Utilities do not have enough information to decide cost effective ways for delivering the service. This is the first study that uses a discrete choice experiment (DCE) to empirically examine how water consumers respond to various price schemes. 146 respondents from Guelph who paid for their water bill were recruited by way of a mall intercept. The estimated choice models suggest that participants' price response varies with the type of tariff. Also, results show that respondents are WTP in order to avoid daily restrictions during the summer.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.014 |
| 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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".