Essays on the determinants and efficiency of utility pricing: an application to changes in the drinking water sector in France.

Summary This thesis proposes a theoretical and empirical study of the determinants of utility pricing and their efficiency conditions. The consideration of environmental and social issues, the deployment of smart grids and the strong constraint of cost control have led to the implementation of new pricing and organizational practices in public services. This thesis proposes three essays devoted to the impact of these new practices in the French drinking water sector. First, we analyze the impact of the transition from a refined to a progressive tariff on the behavior of drinking water consumers, based on a natural experiment conducted in Dunkirk. A first result indicates that the demand decreased with this new tariff, while creating distortions. A second result indicates that the reaction of consumers to the price signal was ambivalent. This work suggests that we should rethink the design of the tariffs and the support of consumers in their choices to limit cognitive biases. Second, we analyze how the local political organization (in France, the level of the commune, the syndicate of communes or the inter-communal level) and the management mode (public or private) can influence the performance of the public service. The impact of these organizational configurations on costs has never been studied simultaneously in the literature. We propose a theoretical model, validated by an empirical study based on a panel of French water utilities, which highlights the impact of these different organizational configurations on the price.