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Abstract
Households are negatively affected by water outages under the context of more frequent natural disasters, aging water infrastructure, and inadequate investment in upgrading the system. Using choice experiment data and random coefficient model, we estimated Kansas households’ willingness to pay (WTP) to avoid water outages during extreme weather events. The results indicate that the WTP increases with the duration of the water outages at a decreasing rate. The WTP is also higher if the water outage occurred during winter. Furthermore, we find heterogeneous preferences of urban and rural households as the former care more about the time and season when water outages occurred. These findings provide important information and insight for policy makers when making investment decisions on hardening water infrastructure.