Environmental challenges in viticulture: a behavioral analysis of blockages and levers for action.

Summary This thesis deals with environmental and health issues in agriculture from the perspective of behavioral economics. Using the emblematic example of the social contestation of pesticide use in the wine industry, we show why the sustainable reorientation of the productive system cannot be achieved without an analysis of the trade-offs made by economic agents. On the demand side, we experimentally measure the competitive effect of certifications (organic agriculture) and technological innovations (e.g. resistant grape varieties, sulfite reduction) on consumer preferences. We observe that consumers are ready to revise their taste requirements in favor of a high level of environmental quality, but that their motivations are partly linked to health expectations, generating contradictory signals for the offer. The low level of information to which they have access is also an obstacle to the selection of the best products. On the supply side, we argue that the response to this demand remains strongly limited by the inertia of the production system. This can be attributed to an aversion to risk but also, once again, to an information deficit, much more than to deviant behavior linked to mimicry, which is often blamed in agriculture. This deficit concerns the possibilities of action of the upstream sector, in our case the wine growers. We then suggest ways of orienting public regulatory policies, at the global level or at the more local level of corporate governance, to facilitate the matching of supply and societal demand.