Incentive mechanisms and surveys: applications to the public economy.

Summary In this thesis, I discuss the use of surveys in the public decision-making process. Equally, I asked myself to what extent the use of surveys with agents who have private information is relevant in the construction of incentive mechanisms. I deal with different problems by adopting a sampling approach in order to highlight the economic issues related to the collection of information. Chapter 2 is devoted to a problem of quality regulation in an economy in which quality is jointly produced by an agent and the users of a public service. In this principal-agent-user structure, the use of a quality survey has a social value. Chapter 4 deals with a problem of revealing preferences for public goods. We construct a mechanism for public decision making that is simple in the sense that decisions about the level of production and cost sharing depend on information conveyed through consultation with a part of the population. Chapter 5 deals with the study of both a problem of preference revelation and of management or control of the quality produced exclusively by an agent. The quality regulation mechanism is based on two successive surveys: one on preferences for quality, the other on the quality actually achieved. The last chapter deals with a problem of regulation of local monopolies where the regulator acts in great ignorance in informational terms. This chapter proposes an analytical framework that is different from the Bayesian framework.