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Abstract
Australian urban water utilities face a significant challenge in designing appropriate
demand management and supply augmentation policies in the presence of significant
water scarcity and climate variability. This article considers the design of optimal
demand management and supply augmentation policies for urban water. In particular,
scarcity pricing is considered as a potential alternative to the predominant demand
management policy of water restrictions. A stochastic dynamic programming model
of an urban water market is developed based on data from the ACT region. Given a
specification of the demand and supply for urban water state dependent optimal price
and investment policies are estimated. The results illustrate how the optimal urban
water price varies inversely with the prevailing storage level and how the optimal timing
of investment differs significantly between rain dependent and rain independent
augmentation options.