The Red and the Green : essays on the economics of information in the sustainable habitat market.

Summary This dissertation investigates the value of information in the context of the economics of green buildings, by combining theoretic, empirical and experimental approaches. First, the perception of Energy Performance Certificate is studied through an artefactual field experiment on a representative sample of the French population. We point up a mixed cognitive efficiency for the label. A significant part of the population ignores it, however attentive subjects do use the label to revise their prior beliefs on energy quality. Second, we provide evidence of the capitalization of this information into real estate prices over two French regions. Low-consumption houses exhibit, ceteris paribus, a significant green premium that matches with techno-economic estimations of associated renovation costs. However, despite this ‘green value’, the pace of energy renovations remains slow in the French market: the energy label information does not reduce uncertainty on the outcomes of the renovation process. In a third time, we show through a strategic option model that the lack of reliable information about renovation quality can delay investment decisions, and even inhibit their diffusion. Recently, several innovations have opened the possibility of producing reliable information on quality in the building industry. Then, fourthly, we explore with a laboratory experiment people's Willingness-To-Pay for information. Its magnitude is evidenced as significantly higher than information theoretic value. Nonetheless, pricing information has overall mixed effects on behaviors, inducing more strategic thinking but also some cognitive biases. A careful design of information markets is thus required.