This paper is about locating sensors in water distribution networks and making inferences on the presence of contamination events based on sensor signals.

The authors looked at risk and ambiguity attitudes among Ethiopian peasants in one of the poorest regions of the world and compared their attitudes to a standard Western university student sample elicited by the same decision task.

Strong risk aversion and ambiguity aversion were found with the Ethiopian peasants, and these attitudes are similar to those of the university students. Testing for the effect of socioeconomic variables on uncertainty attitudes showed that poor health increased both risk and ambiguity aversion.

The authors investigated attitudes toward positionality among rural farmers in northern Ethiopia, using a tailored two-part survey experiment. On average, they found positional concerns neither in income per se, nor in income from aid projects among the farmers. These results support the claim that positional concerns are correlated with absolute level of income of a country.

In previous research, a systematic analytic-deliberative process for public participation in risk ranking was introduced and successfully tested with participants from the United States using heath, safety, and environmental risks.

The design of a sensor-placement scheme capable of detecting all possible contamination events for a water distribution system before consumers are put at risk is essentially impossible given current technologies and budgets.

Willingness to pay for garbage collection services for University of Dar es salaam residential areas has been assessed in this study using Contingent Valuation Method (CVM).

The authors studied the potential tradeoff between countries’ investments in mitigation versus adaptation to climate change. Mitigating greenhouse gases may be a public good, but adaptation to climate change is a private good, benefiting only the country or individual.

Numerous experimental studies have lent credence to the hyperbolic discounting model, which posits that individuals are impatient about immediate or near-term consumption decisions, but are relatively more patient over future consumption.

Studies have shown differences in cooperative behavior across countries and in the use of (and reaction to) a norm enforcement mechanism in cross-cultural studies.

The authors present data that prove that stark differences in both dimensions can exist even within the same town. They created a unique data set, based on one-shot public goods experiments in South Africa. Most of the group differences can be explained by variables for social capital and social environment, such as trust or household violence.

Many resource users are not involved in formulating and enforcement of resource management regulations in developing countries and do not generally accept such rules. Enforcement officers who have social ties to resource users may encounter social disapproval if they enforce regulations zealously, so they may accept bribes to avoid it.