Explaining Changes in Short-Term Water Demand Patterns During the COVID-19 Pandemic: An Absorptive Capacity Perspective

Embedded and mobile systems provide us with an ever-growing variety of potentially valuable information. While collecting and storing such data may be a question of technology, our capacity to generate commercial benefits or public goods from them depends on the “absorptive capacity” of individuals and social systems, for example, the scientific community. Absorptive capacity—as defined by Cohen and Levinthal—is the ability to “recognize the value of new information, assimilate it, and apply it to commercial ends” (Cohen, W. M., & Levinthal, D. A. (1990). Administrative Science Quarterly, 35,128–152). With firms, absorptive capacity is often measured using surveys and subjective statements. When looking at research, however, one can also observe whether new information has been recognized, assimilated, and applied by reviewing scientific publications. Using publicly available data sources related to governmental non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) and to changes in individual behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic as an example, we are attempting to evaluate whether information from these sources has been utilized to detect and explain changes in the short-term demand for water during the pandemic. Although we admittedly relied upon a simple, ad hoc search algorithm, and although there may be a huge body of unpublished or confidential research, our findings still indicate that—even more than 2½ years after the start of what is probably the greatest health crisis in recent history—certain freely accessible and potentially valuable sources of information have only sporadically been considered.