Lanz, Bruno

2017-2, Lanz, Bruno, Provins, Allan

2016, Lanz, Bruno, Provins, Allan

We design a survey to provide quantitative evidence about household demand for qualitative aspects of tap water supply. We focus on two characteristics that are of importance for households: water hardness and aesthetic quality in terms of taste, smell and appearance. Our survey elicits expenditures on products that improve the overall experience of these characteristics of tap water quality, and administration targets a representative sample of the population in England and Wales. For water hardness, our results show that around 14% of households employ at least one water softener device or purchase products such as softening tablets or descaling agents. For the aesthetic quality of tap water, around 39% of households report some averting behaviour, the most common being the use of filtering devices, purchase of bottled water, or addition of squash or cordial. To study how expenditures on these products vary with the level of service quality, we match household data to highly disaggregated records on regional water hardness (in mg CaCO3=l) and aesthetic quality, as measured by the regional rate of complaints to the water service supplier. Our econometric analysis suggests that households’ decision to incur averting expenditures varies with service quality in a statistically and economically significant manner, providing novel evidence that households actively respond to non-health related aspects of tap water quality.

2013-9, Lanz, Bruno, Provins, Allan

2017-1-22, Lanz, Bruno, Provins, Allan, Lang, Ghislaine

We use the averting behavior approach to identify the demand for qualitative aspects of tap water supply, namely water hardness and aesthetic quality in terms of taste, smell and appearance. Based on a representative survey of the UK population, we find that around 14% of households show averting expenditures for water hardness and about 39% for aesthetic quality. Our results suggest that households actively respond to non-health related aspects of tap water quality, with averting behavior being directly related to water hardness and aesthetic quality.

2016, Lanz, Bruno, Provins, Allan

In response to the perceived quality of a public good, households may choose to incur averting expenditures as a substitute to its aggregate provision, thereby revealing an (inverse) demand function. When unobserved heterogeneity affects both perceived quality and averting behavior, identification of the demand function is plagued by a problem of endogeneity. In this paper, we propose the use of an auxiliary (first stage) model of perceived quality as a function of objective quality to recover unbiased and microconsistant estimates of marginal willingness to pay for the provision of the public good. The approach can be applied when people have well-formed perceptions of the quality of the good, a pre- requisite for the averting expenditures method, and when objective quality of provision is plausibly exogenous. We illustrate the approach with data on averting expenditures for two qualitative aspects of household tap water networks: water hardness and aesthetic quality in terms of taste and odor.

2013-1, Tyler, Peter, Warnock, Colin, Provins, Allan, Lanz, Bruno

2016-10, Lanz, Bruno, Provins, Allan

2015-6, Lanz, Bruno, Provins, Allan

2010, Lanz, Bruno, Provins, Allan, Bateman, Ian, Scarpa, Riccardo, Willis, Ken, Ozdemiroglu, Ece