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Residential electricity subsidies in Mexico : exploring options for reform and for enhancing the impact on the poor
Large and growing subsidies to residential consumers in Mexico have become a major policy concern. This report explains the growth of subsidies, the current distribution of subsidies across income classes, and uses utility and household survey data to simulate how alternative subsidy mechanisms could improve distributional and fiscal performance. The goal is to help inform discussion in Mexico about how to reduce subsidies and redirect them toward the poor. The findings also offer lessons for other countries that are planning tariff reforms in their electricity sectors.
eBook
\Utilizing\ Signal Detection Theory
What do inferring what a person is thinking or feeling, judging a defendant's guilt, and navigating a dimly lit room have in common? They involve perceptual uncertainty (e.g., a scowling face might indicate anger or concentration, for which different responses are appropriate) and behavioral risk (e.g., a cost to making the wrong response). Signal detection theory describes these types of decisions. In this tutorial, we show how incorporating the economic concept of utility allows signal detection theory to serve as a model of optimal decision making, going beyond its common use as an analytic method. This utility approach to signal detection theory clarifies otherwise enigmatic influences of perceptual uncertainty on measures of decision-making performance (accuracy and optimality) and on behavior (an inverse relationship between bias magnitude and sensitivity optimizes utility). A \"utilized\" signal detection theory offers the possibility of expanding the phenomena that can be understood within a decision-making framework.
Journal Article
Utility transfers to the general fund: What is reasonable, fair, and legal?
Utility transfers to the local government's general fund can represent a substantial financial obligation for a publicly owned utility and are often disputed. This article addresses what is reasonable, fair, and legal in relation to such transfers and provides recommendations for local governments. Local government officials should: recognize that funding nonutility-related operating or capital costs with utility revenues is not considered a utility best management practice by credit-rating agencies; routinely calculate—and maintain written documentation for—allocations that equitably represent the cost of general fund services provided to the utility; be able to provide written evidence justifying the fairness of the amount or percentage of a transfer representing a rate of return on the utility's investment, provided the transfer is legal and allowable by debt covenants; promote government transparency by separating transfer components in utility budgets; and adopt financial policies that allow easy calculation and projection of transfer amounts.
Journal Article
Comment on \Risk Preferences Are Not Time Preferences\: On the Elicitation of Time Preference under Conditions of Risk
Andreoni and Sprenger (2012a, b) report evidence that distinct utility functions govern choices under certainty and risk. I investigate the robustness of this result to the experimental design, I find that the effect disappears completely when a multiple price list instrument is used instead of a convex time budget design. Alternatively, the effect is reduced by half when sooner and later payment risks are realized using a single lottery instead of two independent lotteries. The result is thus at least partially driven by intertemporal diversification, supporting an explanation in terms of concavity of the intertemporal, and not only atemporal, utility function.
Journal Article
A Review on the Use of Membrane Technology Systems in Developing Countries
Fulfilling the demand of clean potable water to the general public has long been a challenging task in most developing countries due to various reasons. Large-scale membrane water treatment systems have proven to be successful in many advanced countries in the past two decades. This paves the way for developing countries to study the feasibility and adopt the utilization of membrane technology in water treatment. There are still many challenges to overcome, particularly on the much higher capital and operational cost of membrane technology compared to the conventional water treatment system. This review aims to delve into the progress of membrane technology for water treatment systems, particularly in developing countries. It first concentrates on membrane classification and its application in water treatment, including membrane technology progress for large-scale water treatment systems. Then, the fouling issue and ways to mitigate the fouling will be discussed. The feasibility of membrane technologies in developing countries was then evaluated, followed by a discussion on the challenges and opportunities of the membrane technology implementation. Finally, the current trend of membrane research was highlighted to address future perspectives of the membrane technologies for clean water production.
Journal Article
Realization Utility with Reference-Dependent Preferences
We develop a tractable model of realization utility that studies the role of reference-dependent S-shaped preferences in a dynamic investment setting with reinvestment. Our model generates both voluntarily realized gains and losses. It makes specific predictions about the volume of gains and losses, the holding periods, and the sizes of both realized and paper gains and losses that can be calibrated to a variety of statistics, including Odean's measure of the disposition effect. Our model also predicts several anomalies, including, among others, the flattening of the capital market line and a negative price for idiosyncratic risk.
Journal Article
Price perception and nonprice controls under conservation rate structures
This research evaluates the effect of price and nonprice conservation controls on monthly water system demand and explores differences in rate design, education and outreach programs, population growth, and regional climate variables among a national cross section of utilities. Using the Shin price perception parameter, this study found that under conservation rate structures, aggregate demand was related to something other than marginal or average price. The price–demand response increases with higher levels of consumption for both the marginal price and the total bill, which may provide preliminary evidence that the price signal of the total bill matters for demand. Nonprice controls were not found to be statistically significant in the study sample. Income elasticities were positive and slightly larger in magnitude than price elasticities, suggesting that over the long term, utility managers may need to increase rates faster than regional income growth for effective demand management.
Journal Article
The Price of Fairness
In this paper we study resource allocation problems that involve multiple self-interested parties or players and a central decision maker. We introduce and study the price of fairness, which is the relative system efficiency loss under a \"fair\" allocation assuming that a fully efficient allocation is one that maximizes the sum of player utilities. We focus on two well-accepted, axiomatically justified notions of fairness, viz., proportional fairness and max-min fairness. For these notions we provide a tight characterization of the price of fairness for a broad family of problems.
Journal Article
Eliciting Risk and Time Preferences
We design experiments to jointly elicit risk and time preferences for the adult Danish population. Since subjects are generally risk averse, we find that joint elicitation provides estimates of discount rates that are significantly lower than those found in previous studies and more in line with what would be considered as a priori reasonable rates. The statistical specification relies on a theoretical framework that involves a latent trade-off between long-run optimization and short-run temptation. Estimation of this specification is undertaken using structural, maximum likelihood methods. Our main results based on exponential discounting are robust to alternative specifications such as hyperbolic discounting. These results have direct implications for attempts to elicit time preferences, as well as debates over the appropriate domain of the utility function when characterizing risk aversion and time consistency.
Journal Article