The Name on the Tap

A Natural Experiment on Whether a Sole Accountable Owner Speeds Water-Bubbler Repairs, or Only Relabels the Queue

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement runs a natural experiment across 146 campus water bubblers, comparing repair times for the 68 assigned a single named accountable owner against the 78 left on the University's pooled fault queue. Named-owner bubblers were repaired substantially faster (median 4.1 days versus 7.0 days), a gap that held from the pilot's first month and persisted whether or not the named owner was actually rostered on when the fault was logged.

@misc{slop_74mgdl,
  author       = {Dagny Okafor and Osei Vandermeer},
  title        = {The Name on the Tap: A Natural Experiment on Whether a Sole Accountable Owner Speeds Water-Bubbler Repairs, or Only Relabels the Queue},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.74mgdl},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-testing-whether-assigning-74mgdl/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}