Coping With Unreliable Water Supply: An Experimental Study of Exit and Voice
Hoon C. Shin
Lyles School of Civil Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA
Search for more papers by this authorPeyman Yousefi
Lyles School of Civil Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA
Search for more papers by this authorSamuel Park
Lyles School of Civil Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA
Search for more papers by this authorCorresponding Author
David J. Yu
Lyles School of Civil Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA
Department of Political Science, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA
Correspondence to:
D. J. Yu,
Search for more papers by this authorMarco A. Janssen
School of Sustainability, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA
School of Complex Adaptive Systems, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA
Search for more papers by this authorSechindra Vallury
Odum School of Ecology, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA
Search for more papers by this authorEduardo Araral
Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore
Search for more papers by this authorHoon C. Shin
Lyles School of Civil Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA
Search for more papers by this authorPeyman Yousefi
Lyles School of Civil Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA
Search for more papers by this authorSamuel Park
Lyles School of Civil Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA
Search for more papers by this authorCorresponding Author
David J. Yu
Lyles School of Civil Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA
Department of Political Science, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA
Correspondence to:
D. J. Yu,
Search for more papers by this authorMarco A. Janssen
School of Sustainability, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA
School of Complex Adaptive Systems, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA
Search for more papers by this authorSechindra Vallury
Odum School of Ecology, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA
Search for more papers by this authorEduardo Araral
Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore
Search for more papers by this authorAbstract
Unreliable public water supplies cause human hardships and are still common worldwide. Households often deal with the issue by adopting various coping strategies that are representative of economic decentralization (e.g., using private wells, sourcing from third-party vendors) and political decentralization (e.g., making petitions to a public provider). There is growing interest in these user-level decentralized coping strategies, but their relative effects on provider's behavior and the long-term sustainability of public water supply remain unclear. This puzzle has not been tackled using an experimental approach. This study reports a controlled behavioral experiment conducted to test the relative effectiveness of different coping strategies on infrastructure quality and users-provider cooperation in the context of agricultural water supply. We tested experimental treatments involving two classes of coping strategies: exit and voice. The exit option represents users' shift to an alternative water source. The voice option represents users' direct effort to influence a public irrigation service provider. We recruited 272 human subjects into our 4-player experiment (one provider and three users) and observed and compared their decisions under four treatments (exit, voice, their combination, and no options). The results show that the voice option leads to improved outcomes compared to other choices that include the exit option, suggesting that contrary to previously thought, the exit option can be detrimental to users-provider cooperation. We also observed that a user tends to cooperate more (pay and use the public service) when other users do the same.
Key Points
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We conducted a controlled behavioral experiment on people's coping strategies to unreliable public agricultural water supplies
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Tested strategies are exit, which means shifting to an alternative water supply, and voice, which means petitioning to a public agency
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Results show that contrary to previously thought, the exit option can be detrimental to users-provider cooperation
Open Research
Data Availability Statement
The data used for the analysis of relative effects of different experimental treatments (Yu & Shin, 2022) are available at the Zenodo data repository: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7312611.
Supporting Information
| Filename | Description |
|---|---|
| 2022WR032468-sup-0001-Supporting Information SI-S01.docx708 KB | Supporting Information S1 |
Please note: The publisher is not responsible for the content or functionality of any supporting information supplied by the authors. Any queries (other than missing content) should be directed to the corresponding author for the article.
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