Applying evolutionary games to Sanitation Boards

Abstract

Sanitation Boards (SBs) provide drinking water and sanitation in rural and urban communities with populations up to 10.000 inhabitants in Paraguay.

SBs have very different levels of success; some are efficient and sustainable over the time, but others have problems to persist and financial problems. Some of the problems are related to inadequate tariffs, electricity cost and high rate of morosity due to difficulties in applying the existing rules to users that avoid paying their bills for several months but still use the service [2, 3].

We are interested in the last two of them, the high rate of non-payment reached and the inability of SBs to apply existing norms with users that fail to pay their bills.

In this work we formulate the sustainability problem of SBs as a cooperation problem [6]. In the literature, there are evolutionary games models studying the evolution and maintenance of cooperation in a group of people [4, 5]. We propose that these models can reproduce the behavior of SBs and give a better understanding of the problem because as in the literature, depending on the circumstances a rock-scissors-paper cycle behavior is observed in the SBs.