Incentives to water conservation under scarcity: Comparing price and reward effects through stated preferences
Focusing on two different European institutional contexts, a stated preference approach is adopted to elicit the willingness to save water under three alternative incentive policies: a water price increase, monetary reward, and symbolic prize. In addition, two water scarcity scenarios, a ‘critical’ and a ‘regular’ scenario, are devised to analyze how information on water scarcity moderates the effect of incentives. Empirical results show that users become sensitive to monetary incentives (while they remain insensitive to non-monetary ones) when water is scarce.