Seminar SEM: “Understanding Drinking Water Preferences and What It Means for Utilities and Regulators”

We would like to invite you to join the upcoming event in the Seminar Series on Management and Systems Engineering, hosted by the RCM2+ research centre at Universidade Lusófona.

The event will take place on July 1st, 2026, from 18:00 to 19:00 (WEST | Lisbon time), in Room K4, Espaço Kuadro, with the option to attend online via Teams.

The seminar is titled “Understanding Drinking Water Preferences and What It Means for Utilities and Regulators”, and will be led by Dr. Bethany Cooper, ARC Mid-Career Industry Fellow at Adelaide University, Australia.

This seminar will examine how consumer preferences for drinking water quality can be better understood and incorporated into utility planning and regulatory decision-making. In a context of substantial planned investment in water infrastructure across Europe, the United States, and Australia, the presentation will highlight the growing importance of understanding not only safety standards but also consumer perceptions of taste, odour, and appearance in drinking water. The seminar will discuss how water regulators assess investment needs and how current approaches may insufficiently reflect local consumer preferences.

The presentation will introduce a sensory discrete-choice field experiment designed to elicit drinking water taste preferences using an anchored approach relative to absolute quality thresholds, rather than simple relative rankings. Implemented with a large public sample in South Australia, the method provides a theoretically grounded alternative to traditional sensory testing approaches that often rely on small panels of trained participants. The results highlight the value of incorporating consumer preferences into water quality assessment and raise questions about the efficiency of current and planned investments in drinking water infrastructure.

Dr. Bethany Cooper is an Australian Research Council Mid-Career Industry Fellow and applied economist at UniSA Business. Her research focuses on water policy and management, resource economics, and the interface between gender, agriculture, and development. Her work centres on applied policy analysis in the water sector, particularly on understanding complex trade-offs and decision-making. She has led research projects for several Australian and international agencies, including CSIRO, SA Water, and state and national water authorities, and has published widely in leading academic journals.

We look forward to your participation in this discussion on drinking water preferences and the implications for utilities and regulators.

The event will be held in a hybrid format:

In person: Room K4, Espaço Kuadro
Online: Microsoft Teams platform
Join via Teams

Admission is free and open to the entire academic community and anyone interested in these topics.