|
Field
Experimental Design (Public)
|
Before
In many peri-urban communities in developing countries (like Ouagadougou), the market for sanitation services (especially mechanical desludging) is under-developed, and households often resort to using inferior (manual desludging) methods.
In Burkina Faso, we use measures of the underlying values for improved desludging services from a survey run in December, 2014, and second-price auctions for the procurement of desludging services run from December 2014 through July 2015 to develop a model of the optimal tariffs to charge each household for desludging services in order to increase take-up as much as possible given a constrained budget for subsidies.
We test the modeled “ideal” prices against two options: first, a pure control group of households which are offered no pricing intervention, and second, a group of households that are asked to call into the call center for a desludging when they need one, and are given the lowest cost desludger that the call center is able to find through a bid-undercutting mechanism.
The endline survey will be rolled out after the randomized price structures have been in effect for 12 months. At this point, we expect the median household to have used 2 desludgings since the roll out of the price structures, and we will be able to observe the relative impact of the different price structures, estimate demand for sanitation services, and estimate the impact of the monitoring interventions.
|
After
In many peri-urban communities in developing countries (like Ouagadougou), the market for sanitation services (especially mechanical desludging) is under-developed, and households often resort to using inferior (manual desludging) methods.
In Burkina Faso, we use measures of the underlying values for improved desludging services from a survey run in December, 2014, and second-price auctions for the procurement of desludging services run from December 2014 through July 2015 to develop a model of the optimal tariffs to charge each household for desludging services in order to increase take-up as much as possible given a constrained budget for subsidies.
We test the modeled “ideal” prices against two options: first, a pure control group of households which are offered no pricing intervention, and second, a group of households that are asked to call into the call center for a desludging when they need one, and are given the lowest cost desludger that the call center is able to find through a bid-undercutting mechanism.
The endline survey will be rolled out after the randomized price structures have been in effect for at least 12 months. At this point, we expect the median household to have used 2 desludgings since the roll out of the price structures, and we will be able to observe the relative impact of the different price structures, estimate demand for sanitation services, and estimate the impact of the monitoring interventions.
|