This paper addresses the issue of price negotiation between a municipality and a private water utility operator, and its implications for residential water demand estimation. Because negotiated price may depend on municipality's specific characteristics, competing forms of price endogeneity have to be considered when using panel data. The impact of variables such as average income, housing and system features is investigated both on municipal consumption and price. We use efficient procedures to estimate a water demand equation on a panel of French municipalities. Estimated price and income elasticities are significant and close to previous, household-level studies.

The sustainability of agro-ecosystems depends on their ability to deliver an entire package of multiple ecosystem services, rather than provisioning services alone. New social and ecological dimensions of agricultural management must be explored in agricultural landscapes, to foster this ability. We propose a social–ecological framework for the service-based management of agro-ecosystems, specified through an explicit and symmetric representation of the ecosystem and the social system, and the dynamic links between them. It highlights how management practices, with their multiple effects, could drive the provision of multiple services. Based on this framework, we have identified the design of collective multiservice management as a key research issue. It requires innovations in stakeholder organizations and tools to foster synergy between ecosystem functioning and social dynamics, given the complexity and uncertainties of ecological systems

Agricultural production systems should evolve fast to cope with risks induced by climate change. Farmers should adapt their management strategies to stay competitive and satisfy the societal demand for sustainable food systems. It is therefore important to understand the decision-making processes used by farmers for adaptation. Processes of adaptation are in particular addressed by bio-economic and bio-decision models. Here, we review bio-economic and bio-decision models, in which strategic and tactical decisions are included in dynamic adaptive and expectation-based processes, in 40 literature articles. The major points are: adaptability, flexibility, and dynamic processes are common ways to characterize farmers' decisionmaking. Adaptation is either a reactive or a proactive process depending on farmer flexibility and expectation capabilities. Various modeling methods are used to model decision stages in time and space, and some methods can be combined to represent a sequential decision-making process.

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This article illustrates the importance of estimating risk preferences when evaluating water policy. Using agricultural production data from the Kiti region of Cyprus we estimate farmers' risk preferences a la Antle (Journal of Business and Economic Statistics, 1, 192-201, 1983, American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 69, 509-22, 1987) and show sensitivity to higher order moments of profit, such as skewness. We show that farmers in the Kiti region are risk averse with risk premiums in the region of 20% of expected profit. We use these estimates to analyse the impact of a water quota from the perspective of three policy-makers who differ only in their understanding of farmers' risk preferences. We show in the case of Kiti that policy-makers who model risk preferences incorrectly, that is, either; (a) assume risk neutrality or; (b) ignore down-side risk, wrongly predict the magnitude and direction of input responses and therefore the magnitude of welfare changes. This highlights the importance of accommodating preferences for higher order moments of profit in the evaluation of water policy.