Preferences for policy attributes and willingness to pay for water quality improvements under uncertainty

Abstract

When exploring environmental policy options, sometimes neither the current state of the environmental good being analyzed nor the effectiveness of the proposed policy is known with certainty. This is the case with privately owned, residential, onsite wastewater treatment systems (septic systems)—there is ample evidence that they can contribute to water quality impairment, but their contribution is generally stochastic in nature and the efficacy of technological solutions is uncertain. Furthermore, the benefits of ameliorating water quality impairments are public in nature. Septic system owners are legally responsible for maintaining their systems, but requiring them to upgrade otherwise properly functioning tanks is outside the scope of water quality regulations. An incentive structure is necessary to induce private homeowners to invest in septic upgrades that deliver both private benefits in addition to the positive externality for the wider public and environment. The question for policy makers is how these private incentives should be financed, and whether public support can be garnered. Results of a choice experiment in Gwinnett County, Georgia, accounting for both sources of uncertainty—the current state of water quality and the efficacy of the intervention—in the design of water quality policy are presented. We find baseline water quality conditions and policy efficacy significantly affect public support for a policy transferring public funds to private homeowners, in terms of both sentiment and willingness to pay. The manner in which costs are shared across stakeholders also affects the selection of a policy option, but not willingness to pay for it.

Willingness to Pay for the Maintenance of Green Infrastructure in Six Chinese Pilot Sponge Cities

“…We used this method to investigate the public's perceptions on the maintenance of GI and their attitudes toward paying a maintenance fee. The method has been used in many similar studies [1,3,21,37,42,[44][45][46][47]; Thus the method is well described and tested, but to our knowledge has not been applied in assessing willingness to pay for GI maintenance.…”

“…When conducting the questionnaires, we selected three kinds of places, specifically communities having built sponge city GI facilities, shopping malls in the city center, and local parks with sponge city GI facilities. Since income was reported as an influencing factor of WTP by many studies [25,44,46,48], the respondents under the age of 18 or with no income were not included. In addition, we avoided the respondents' who were renting apartments, considering that housing tenure may influence their WTP.…”

Investigating Heterogeneous Consumer Preference for Sustainable Sewerage Asset Management: The Case of South Korea

“…Successful consumercentric asset management is considered a strategic business tool that has a positive impact not only on the satisfaction of providers and beneficiaries, but also on business profitability [3,23]. It is also noteworthy in that consumer-centric services positively affect economic, environmental, and social efficiency, especially in policy management procedures, as this leads to sustainable environmental improvement with great public support and larger willingness to pay (WTP) [2,3,24]. The asset management process consists of four steps, as shown in Figure 1 [25].…”