ABSTRACT

Many water utilities offer price caps to reassure consumers about future prices. Researchers have focused largely on the implication of price caps on total cost of ownership or conservation rather than consumers’ preference for such guarantees. In this paper, we examine consumers’ preferences for price caps. We first consider how consumers form expectations about their water prices, and secondly how they evaluate those expected prices against guarantees. Our empirical investigation, using new survey data, confirms that as variability of historic prices increases, consumers use less historic information to form their expectations, and replace it with more subjective information, such as their perceptions of the water supplier’s investment efficiency and the quality of their water. Further, water consumers who are more motivated to protect themselves, as demonstrated by averting behaviours even when they consider service quality to be good, more strongly prefer a guarantee when past prices have been highly variable.

摘要

许多自来水公司提供价格上限，以让消费者对未来的价格放心。研究人员主要关注价格上限对总拥有成本或保护成本的影响，而不是消费者对此类保证的偏好。在本文中，我们研究了消费者对价格上限的偏好。我们首先考虑消费者如何形成对他们的水价的预期，其次他们如何根据保证来评估这些预期价格。我们使用新的调查数据进行的实证调查证实，随着历史价格变化的增加，消费者使用较少的历史信息来形成他们的期望，取而代之的是更多的主观信息，例如他们对供水商投资效率和质量的看法。他们的水。更远，