Domestic water pricing with household surveys : a study of acceptability and willingness to pay in Chongqing, China

In determining domestic water prices, policy makers often need to use information about the demand side rather than only relying on information about the supply side. Household surveys have frequently been employed to collect demand-side information. This paper presents a multiple bounded discrete choice household survey model. It discusses how the model can be utilized to collect and analyze information about the acceptability of different water prices by different types of households, as well as households'willingness to pay for water service improvement. The results obtained from these surveys can be directly utilized in the development of water pricing and subsidy policies. The paper also presents an empirical multiple bounded discrete choice study conducted in Chongqing, China. In this case, domestic water service quality was seriously inadequate, but financial resources were insufficient to improve service quality. With a survey of about 1,500 households in five suburban districts in Chongqing Municipality, this study shows that a significant increase in the water price is feasible as long as the poorest households can be properly subsidized and certain public awareness and accountability campaigns can be conducted to make the price increase more acceptable to the public. The analysis also indicates that the order in which hypothetical prices are presented to respondents systematically affects their answers, and should be taken into account when designing survey instruments.Town Water Supply and Sanitation,Water Supply and Sanitation Governance and Institutions,Environmental Economics&Policies,Water and Industry,Water Supply and Systems

Time-dependent Aharonov-Bohm effect on the noncommutative space

We study the time-dependent Aharonov-Bohm effect on the noncommutative space. Because there is no net Aharonov-Bohm phase shift in the time-dependent case on the commutative space, therefore, a tiny deviation from zero indicates new physics. Based on the Seiberg-Witten map we obtain the gauge invariant and Lorentz covariant Aharonov-Bohm phase shift in general case on noncommutative space. We find there are two kinds of contribution: momentum-dependent and momentum-independent corrections. For the momentum-dependent correction, there is a cancellation between the magnetic and electric phase shifts, just like the case on the commutative space. However, there is a non-trivial contribution in the momentum-independent correction. This is true for both the time-independent and time-dependent Aharonov-Bohm effects on the noncommutative space. However, for the time-dependent Aharonov-Bohm effect, there is no overwhelming background which exists in the time-independent Aharonov-Bohm effect on both commutative and noncommutative space. Therefore, the time-dependent Aharonov-Bohm can be sensitive to the spatial noncommutativity. \draftnote{The net correction is proportional to the product of the magnetic fluxes through the fundamental area represented by the noncommutative parameter $\theta$, and through the surface enclosed by the trajectory of charged particle.} More interestingly, there is an anti-collinear relation between the logarithms of the magnetic field $B$ and the averaged flux $\Phi/N$ (N is the number of fringes shifted). This nontrivial relation can also provide a way to test the spatial noncommutativity. For $B\Phi/N\sim 1$, our estimation on the experimental sensitivity shows that it can reach the $\rm 10GeV$ scale. This sensitivity can be enhanced by using stronger magnetic field strength, larger magnetic flux, as well as higher experimental precision on the phase shift.Comment: 12 pages, 1 figure; v2, accepted version by PL

Resummation prediction on top quark transverse momentum distribution at large pT

We study the factorization and resummation of t-channel top quark transverse momentum distribution at large pT in the SM at both the Tevatron and the LHC with soft-collinear effective theory. The cross section in the threshold region can be factorized into a convolution of hard, jet and soft functions. In particular, we first calculate the NLO soft functions for this process, and give a RG improved cross section by evolving the different functions to a common scale. Our results show that the resummation effects increase the NLO results by about 9%-13% and 4%-9% when the top quark pT is larger than 50 and 70 GeV at the Tevatron and the 8 TeV LHC, respectively. Also, we discuss the scale independence of the cross section analytically, and show how to choose the proper scales at which the perturbative expansion can converge fast.Comment: 32 pages, 10 figures, version published in Phys.Rev.