AbstractsEconomics

This dissertation examines the decision-making of poor rural Kenyan households with respect to the adoption of point-of-use (POU) safe water technologies designed to expand access to safe drinking water in the developing world. Low-cost POU products such as chlorine and filters substantially reduce diarrhea, which kills two million children in poor countries each year. Nevertheless, POU products remain little used in many parts of the developing world, even when they are widely available at subsidized prices. This dissertation presents results from a six-month field experiment conducted in rural western Kenya that provided all participating households exposure to a variety of free POU products. The design of this study allows me to compare competing safe water products as well as to explore the primary factors that determine consumer preferences for water treatment. In chapter 1 I consider relative consumer preferences for, and the use of, three competing POU products to understand the role of product design in adoption. My study cycled 400 households through three successive, randomly ordered two-month trials of three competing POU products. I find that households' stated preferences for products often deviate from their revealed usage behaviors. I find suggestive evidence that a product's market value plays a role in stated, but not revealed, preference. In particular, the cheapest of the three products, a liquid chlorine product branded as WaterGuard, was consistently used at the highest rates by households. Nonetheless, when households were asked to choose a six-month supply of one of the three products as a parting gift at the end of our study when all households had experienced all products, WaterGuard was chosen at the lowest rates. This divergence of stated and revealed preferences could have important implications for the scalability of all three POU products: If households will use what they won't choose (in a market setting) and vice versa, reducing disease and achieving market scalability may be two distinct problems to solve. Of course, these findings ignore the role of price, an issue we consider in chapter 3.In chapter 2, I consider the common decision-making barriers to the adoption of any safe water product or behavior. I hypothesize that incomplete information and behavioral biases may constrain a household's decision to use a POU technology. To test these hypotheses, households were randomly assigned to receive the results of water quality tests, as well as marketing messages designed to appeal to well-known decision-making heuristics. Sharing water quality information increased water treatment by 8-13 percentage points, representing a 12-23% increase over base values. Social marketing messages that harnessed findings from behavioral economics increased water treatment by an additional 9-11 percentage points in total. In particular, framing safe water products as both increasing health and avoiding disease (not just increasing health) increased usage on the order of 4-6 percentage points. This…