https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5646-3894
Peer Review History
| Original SubmissionFebruary 23, 2022 |
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PONE-D-22-05048Product preferences and willingness to pay for potable water delivery: Experimental evidence from rural Bihar, IndiaPLOS ONE Dear Dr. Cameron, Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process. Please submit your revised manuscript by Sep 25 2022 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file. Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:
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Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ********** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ********** 3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ********** 4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English? PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ********** 5. Review Comments to the Author Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters) Reviewer #1: Review of “Product preferences and willingness to pay for potable water delivery: Experimental evidence from rural Bihar, India” The manuscript reports on a well-executed experiment eliciting preferences for a small amount (20L) of delivered, high-quality water in Bihar, India. The paper is clear and well-written, the experiment is novel and, for the most part, the conclusions are policy-relevant and supported by the results. I found the work on experiential learning useful. I commend the authors for their transparency about methods and deviations from the registered research plan as well as the study’s limitations. These limitations are noted at the close of the article and include most importantly the fact that the sample is somewhat small and the samples were not randomized (and are unbalanced) across their two auctions. I have a number of comments and suggestions, though most are fairly minor. I denote comments that I would expect to see addressed in a revision (should the editor request one) with an asterisk. Those without an asterisk are collegial feedback and can be taken or left without prejudice. • The authors seem primarily interested in the quality dimension of the service. I found myself interested in the delivery dimension, which would also save households collection time. This is largely unexplored here. The authors cite only one paper on this time dimension (Devoto et al). There are a large number of studies that have examined questions around water collection time, but the authors might want to at least cite two other high-quality, well-identified studies (Meeks et al 2017 and Gross et al 2018, refs provided at the end) and they may wish to at least reference the literature that examines revealed preference for time and quality by modeling households’ choice of source. Wagner et al. (2019) is a recent paper in this latter literature and includes a good review of the other existing work. *In the work at hand, if it was collected, it would be useful to at least report information on a) distance to the nearest shallow well (or do all households have wells on their compound?) and b) total water collection (to get a sense of how large a fraction a 20L delivery is) • Line 159-164. I assume the 20L bottle and dispenser needed to participate in the program would of course have some alternate use as a normal storage container, should the household purchase the hardware but then discontinue with the delivery service. This isn’t discussed, and it would be helpful in this spot of the manuscript to perhaps report the going price for a “normal” 20L plastic jerrican that I would assume is ubiquitous in the region. This would help inform how much of a premium you are asking households to pay for the somewhat specialized part of the hardware. • Section 2.3. I commend the authors for providing the complete BDM script for Auction 1 in the appendix. o The included “tripwire” questions to test for understanding are great. As the authors may know, there have been some concerns raised recently about whether respondents understand BDM mechanisms. Buchardi et al (2022) in Uganda included some similar tripwire questions and found no problems with understanding. You might consider briefly reporting what you found – how many respondents got that first tripwire wrong and needed re-explanation - to contribute to this literature o *I found Auction 2 a bit more confusing, so I suggest you also include the full experimental script for that auction as well. o One part of Auction 2 that puzzled me was the inclusion of a new dimension of choice – the number of deliveries. You seem to have given respondents the opportunity to buy more than one delivery per day (unlike in Auction 1), but then this would require another purchase of a 20L tank and dispenser, correct? I suspect no one was interested in purchasing multiple deliveries, but you might consider reporting on this to help clarify. o Line 301 “household-level covariates that may be endogenous to the bid price”. I found this language confusing. Endogenous makes me think of endogenous choices, but I think what you mean is that they are included to account for the imbalance in household characteristics between Auction 1 and Auction 2 because you didn’t randomize into those two treatments. Simpler language might be an improvement. o Line 442-44 and Table 2. � Table 4 includes a covariate called “person can make decisions”. *Please report this in Table 2 and explain why the survey would have been conducted with someone who could not make decisions. � As noted above, a major concern for the study is external validity. Comparison here with some representative census data for Bihar would be very useful. o Line 483: *I interpret your results also to mean that the 50% delivery discount had no effect on WTP: it was no different than WTP in Auction 1. This is apparent in the figures and the regression results, but unless I missed it, this is not highlighted in the text. Furthermore, several parts of the conclusions section (e.g. lines 619-620) seem to imply that your results show that modest subsidies can boost uptake. I may be wrong, but I don’t believe you found that. Instead, you found an experimental effect that when respondents in Auction 2 knew they might get a discount but then lost the lottery, it *lowered* WTP. By the way, I don’t think calling this a “negative externality” is quite correct, though I’m not sure of the correct term for the bad feeling you get when losing a lottery (experimental psychologist may have one). o Stated preference: the design of the experiment seems sound and the status quo is sensibly constructed. There are, however, a few things I would consider non-standard that the authors might address or clarify. � *Most studies in this realm start from random utility theory, build out to an empirical model with assumptions about additive observable utility and iid type 1 errors for the unobserved components. They interpret model coefficients as utility differences. Most studies don’t spell all this out, but at least reference the RUM grounding. I believe the multinomial logistic approach used here is the same, but it might help some readers to make this connection. If the theoretical grounding is not RUM, please explain. � Although the delivery price was an attribute, the authors chose not to elicit WTP by including an upfront cost component (as in the Auctions). They return to this point in lines 670-672. Is there an explanation worth providing for why this wasn’t done? � Another non-standard feature is the construction of the choice sets in the experimental design. Researchers typically construct the full universe of choices and eliminate dominated alternatives, as you do here. But then we typically proceed to use software like Ngene to sample (and re-sample) from the remaining choices to construct a limited number of choice sets that have desirable properties like attribute balance and efficiency in identifying preference (i.e. D-efficiency). We then give all respondents that subset, or assign them in blocks to respondents. Here you simply randomly chose from the 124 choice sets in the field, which I’ve never seen done. This is probably defensible but comes at a cost of inefficiency and the possibility of attribute balance. *I would like to see at least a defense of this approach (perhaps referencing other work that does this) or an acknowledgement that it is non-standard so other researchers new to the literature don’t unthinkingly replicate it. I suspect it is fine, but I would also like to see an appendix table showing attribute balance in the choices actually shown to subjects. For example, among all the choice tasks actually chosen and completed, how often did Rs.0 appear? How often Rs. 6, 9, etc and how often safe to drink vs. not safe to drink? � *Is there a reason you don’t model delivery price as a continuous variable? I worry that perhaps it was not significant in some models as a continuous variable, namely Table 7 where the effect of Rs. 6 is larger than Rs. 9. Modeling as continuous would allow you to calculate part-worth WTP for convenience, safety and temperature. � A small point on Table 1: the layout confused me when I first looked at it. Rather than have four columns (which made me think there were four alternatives), you might just say “Price : 0,3,6 and 9 INR” and “Taste: Tastes nice(=1) or Tastes bad(=0). � *Please clarify what options respondents were given. At various points you say they could answer “Neither”, “no preference” or “prefer not to answer”. These are not equivalent and are three different preference statements. And I would simply report out and then drop the respondent who answered that he or she didn’t understand. o Line 551-553. *I was confused by the language here. I would report separately the number of winners from Auction 1 and Auction 2. Also, it reads as if 66 people “won” the BDM auction but then only 56 actually got the service, so that 10 dropped out. This of course would violate the BDM procedures, since answers are binding. I think it is just wording, but please clarify. o Line 574: on the percentage who chose the alternative vs. status quo: I don’t see where in the results this statement comes from. Models like these often have an “alternate specific constant” dummy to capture status quo choices, but your model doesn’t, nor do I see a constant. o In the discussion of the perceptions of attributes: I think Figure 7 and Table 8 overlap enough and would suggest just presenting Table 8. I didn’t find this material particularly interesting. I’m also not sure (line 581) I would call these “stated preferences questions”. While it is literally true, that term tends to be reserved among folks in the field for a specific set of activities. These are just opinion questions. o Line 602-3: Again I had trouble matching your statement here to specific results. o Line 639-641. I agree with this statement, but there is a literature in the stated preference world on “test-retest” studies that is not cited here. A number of studies have re-surveyed the same households over time to see if preferences and WTP are stable. Brouwer et al (2016) is an example of a relatively recent one that has references to older studies. o Lines 641-651, the discussion on purchasers vs. non-purchases is interesting and informative. These sentences mix together the effects (for noncustomers) of how the taste test and social marketing impacted preferences and the effects (for customers) of how the taste test, marketing AND product experienced shifted preferences. I was particularly interested in teasing out the effects of experience, so I’d consider re-writing this section to keep the effects clear in the readers’ mind. References Brouwer, R., I. Logar, and O. Sheremet. 2016. “Choice Consistency and Preference Stability in Test-Retests of Discrete Choice Experiment and Open-Ended Willingness to Pay Elicitation Formats.” Environmental and Resource Economics 68(3):1–23. Burchardi, K.B., J. de Quidt, S. Gulesci, B. Lerva, and S. Tripodi. 2021. “Testing willingness to pay elicitation mechanisms in the field: Evidence from Uganda.” Journal of Development Economics 152(June):102701. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jdeveco.2021.102701. Gross, E., I. Guenther, Y. Schipper, and V. Der Walle. 2018. “Women are Walking and Waiting for Water: The Time Value of Public Water Supply.” Economic Development and Cultural Change. Jalan, J., and E. Somanathan. 2008. “The importance of being informed: Experimental evidence on demand for environmental quality.” Journal of Development Economics 87:14–28. Meeks, R. 2017. “Water works: The economic impact of water infrastructure.” Journal of Human Resources. Wagner, J., J. Cook, and P. Kimuyu. 2019. “Household demand for water in rural Kenya.” Environmental and Resource Economics 74(4):1563–1584. Reviewer #2: Summary: The authors work with an NGO to gather data regarding household preferences about a potable, clean water delivery service in Bihar, India. The authors use both revealed and stated preference methods to derive household willingness to pay for this delivery service and its associated hardware, and additionally evaluate 1) changes in household willingness to pay depending on getting or not getting a discounted price on delivery and 2) the importance and prioritization of different characteristics of water. They do so using an auction style revealed preference game and a stated preference discrete choice experiment. Noting the small sample size, the authors find that households that do not receive the discounted rate have a much lower willingness to pay for the service, and only a small portion of these households placed a positive bid. They also find that respondents’ stated preferences over taste of water and convenience of delivery change within one week of purchase. Comments: 1. While both the WTP and DCE experiments are interesting, the WTP auction was very confusing to understand, and I would recommend making exact market prices, how much respondents know about market prices, and whether respondents are being given the market price clearer in the beginning of the paper. For example, the bottle and dispenser are 250 or 275 rupees in line 163. But Table 3 says the “market price of the good auctioned”, so that would be the hardware in Auction 2, is 285 rupees. In general, I think this section could use some wordsmithing to make the step-by-step process of the auction very clear. 2. Similarly, I think hypotheses 1 and 2 could be clearer. First, perhaps the authors could define “a” which I’ve understood is the difference in bids between Auction 1 and Auction 2 after removing the delivery fee in Auction 1, but is not immediately obvious. Second, it would be helpful to add a one line explanation of why we except a<35 in H1 and a>70 in H2. 3. A criteria in sampling selection was that the respondents were easily reachable by delivery drivers, meaning they are located along a main road. This means these are likely more affluent individuals (as the authors note in the discussion) and also that it is less likely that “negative learning” in terms of timely deliveries or warm water temperatures will occur. I wouldn’t generalize these results to a population in more rural settings. 4. In lines 491-494, I would recommend mentioning the lack of statistical significance in the groups that did receive the discount, with a short rationale for why that may occur. 5. Line 553 is a very confusing sentence I had to re-read multiple times. ********** 6. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files. If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public. Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy. Reviewer #1: No Reviewer #2: No ********** [NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". 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| Revision 1 |
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PONE-D-22-05048R1Product preferences and willingness to pay for potable water delivery: Experimental evidence from rural Bihar, IndiaPLOS ONE Dear Dr. Cameron, Thank you for submitting the revised version of your manuscript. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit and you have done a good job responding to the reviewers' comments. While the first reviewer has no further comments, reviewer #2 has some minor ones. I believe you should be able to address these minor points in no time. I very much look forward to reading the revised version of your paper, after which I hope to make the final decision on your submission. Please submit your revised manuscript by Mar 02 2023 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file. Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:
If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols. Additionally, PLOS ONE offers an option for publishing peer-reviewed Lab Protocol articles, which describe protocols hosted on protocols.io. Read more information on sharing protocols at https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-email&utm_source=authorletters&utm_campaign=protocols. We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript. Kind regards, Ilke Onur, Ph.D. Academic Editor PLOS ONE Journal Requirements: Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice. [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author 1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation. Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed Reviewer #2: (No Response) ********** 2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. Reviewer #1: (No Response) Reviewer #2: Yes ********** 3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: (No Response) Reviewer #2: Yes ********** 4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified. Reviewer #1: (No Response) Reviewer #2: Yes ********** 5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English? PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here. Reviewer #1: (No Response) Reviewer #2: Yes ********** 6. Review Comments to the Author Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters) Reviewer #1: I have read the responses to my earlier comments and the revised manuscript and am satisfied. As I said earlier, I truly appreciate the authors' transparency and commitment to high-quality and pre-registered research. I will now add that I also appreciate their willingness to take feedback so constructively. Reviewer #2: Thanks to the authors for their responses and thorough revisions. I have just a few more comments, mostly minor. Major comments: In "2.3 Willingness to pay: Random price auctions" starting on line 253, how were households identified? This is important, as, if not random, using Auction 1 on the first 69 households and Auction 2 on the last 93 households can produce biased results. Line 206 “Study Setting": How does this setting impact the interpretation of results? What population are we learning about? Paragraph starting on line 373: Even though you use a status-quo scenario and compare alternatives to this, with 124 possible scenarios but only 162 respondents, are you powered enough to find anything? And if so, is the N so small it may be biased? Minor comments: Line 61: “Access to piped water has expanded significantly (Murray et al. 2020), but, as of 2020, just over 83% of urban households and 42% of rural households received piped water services (WHO/UNICEF 2021)” Is this referring to the 2 billion households using contaminated water or all total households? Line 101-112 onward should be present tense. Same with line 137. Line 600: “though, notably, the coefficient on a price of ₹9 is large and negative.” What does this mean? What is the interpretation? Line 651 : “Our findings led to a failure to reject alternative hypothesis 2, suggesting that the effect of missing out on small discounts had modest but larger negative effects on demand.” How does this suggestion/interpretation depend on possible biases in estimates? ********** 7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files. If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public. Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy. Reviewer #1: Yes: Joseph Cook Reviewer #2: No ********** [NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.] While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step. |
| Revision 2 |
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Product preferences and willingness to pay for potable water delivery: Experimental evidence from rural Bihar, India PONE-D-22-05048R2 Dear Dr. Cameron, We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements. Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication. An invoice for payment will follow shortly after the formal acceptance. To ensure an efficient process, please log into Editorial Manager at http://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/, click the 'Update My Information' link at the top of the page, and double check that your user information is up-to-date. If you have any billing related questions, please contact our Author Billing department directly at authorbilling@plos.org. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org. Kind regards, Ilke Onur, Ph.D. Academic Editor PLOS ONE |
| Formally Accepted |
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PONE-D-22-05048R2 Product preferences and willingness to pay for potable water delivery: Experimental evidence from rural Bihar, India Dear Dr. Cameron: I'm pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been deemed suitable for publication in PLOS ONE. Congratulations! Your manuscript is now with our production department. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please let them know about your upcoming paper now to help maximize its impact. If they'll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team within the next 48 hours. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information please contact onepress@plos.org. If we can help with anything else, please email us at plosone@plos.org. Thank you for submitting your work to PLOS ONE and supporting open access. Kind regards, PLOS ONE Editorial Office Staff on behalf of Dr. Ilke Onur Academic Editor PLOS ONE |
Open letter on the publication of peer review reports
PLOS recognizes the benefits of transparency in the peer review process. Therefore, we enable the publication of all of the content of peer review and author responses alongside final, published articles. Reviewers remain anonymous, unless they choose to reveal their names.
We encourage other journals to join us in this initiative. We hope that our action inspires the community, including researchers, research funders, and research institutions, to recognize the benefits of published peer review reports for all parts of the research system.
Learn more at ASAPbio .