"Nitrate pollution, perceived water quality, drinking water choice and water prices"
Jeudi 13 février de 12h30 à 13h30 en salle C322, Olivier Beaumais nous présentera son article intitulé "Nitrate pollution, perceived water quality, drinking water choice and water prices" (co écrit avec Romain Crastes)
Abstract. The way that consumers perceive the quality of drinking water in relation to nitrate pollution from agriculture may influence their main drinking water choice (tap water, filtered water or bottled water). Indeed, polluted tap water is associated with health risks. In addition, the literature usually discards the important price difference between bottled water and tap water as a predictor of drinking water choices. In France, which is the context of our study, bottled water is about 100 times more expensive than tap water. In this paper, we use a dataset of about 4,000 individuals, which is rich enough to allow us not only to assess how drinking water choices are associated with the perceived quality of water resources but also with the perceived price difference between bottled water and tap water. We use a hybrid choice model framework where we jointly model drinking water choices together with the perception of tap water in terms of quality and price. These models are interacted by the means of two latent variables which alleviates some of the endogeneity issues which are usually found in the literature on drinking water choice. Our results suggest that respondents who are more likely to report the quality of water resources as “poor” or “very poor” are less likely to drink tap water and that the respondents who fail to report the correct price difference between tap water and bottled water are more likely to drink bottled water.