CRETTEZ Bertrand

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We introduce a pollution permits market in a two-sector oligopoly equilibrium model. In this model, one commodity is inelastically supplied by one competitive trader and another one is produced by a finite set of oligopolists, using the first commodity as an input. The production of the second commodity is a polluting activity. Introducing a competitive emission permits market solves the pollution control problem but does not alleviate market distortions. We provide some conditions under which giving a supply subsidy to the oligopolists that is financed by a tax on the competitive agent is welfare increasing.

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In both the United States of America and the European Union, Member States are encouraged to prevent young people from starting to smoke by forbidding selling tobacco products to people under a certain age. By contrast, there are in general no legal minimum age requirements for consuming those products. Our aim is to address such discrepancy from a theoretical viewpoint by focusing on the case where people have time-inconsistent preferences. Specifically, we build a three-period (youth, adulthood, old age) model of smoking decision in which individual intertemporal preferences are present-biased. Then, using this model, we show that when agents are naive, that is when they are unaware that their intertemporal preferences are time-inconsistent, it may be worthwhile, from the individual viewpoint, to legally prevent young people from smoking. This conclusion does not always hold, because what is good for an agent in youth can be disputable in adult age (and conversely). When individuals are sophisticated, that is, not naive, a legal smoking age (either for buying, consuming or selling tobacco products) is pointless. This conclusion is also reached if one follows the continuing person approach advocated by Sugden. JEL Classification Numbers : I12, I18, K32, D15.

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Sustainable development is an attractive topic for economists. In the literature on economic growth and sustainable development, two basic approaches are used in most discussions. The first is to recognize the importance of natural resources as well as the strategies for using these resources for economic development in the context of their depletion. The second is the issue of intergenerational equity in which the needs of present generations can be met without compromising the ability to meet the needs of future generations. My thesis aims to investigate theoretical models of natural resources, economic growth, development, and equity. Chapter 1 examines a two-sector economy with externalities. We study a theoretical model that investigates the relationship between the optimal dynamics of economic growth using renewable resources and environmental quality. In this model, the industrial sector uses intermediate inputs to produce a final consumption good, and another sector, called the exploitation sector, engages in the exploitation of a renewable resource. This resource can be sold directly at an exogenously determined market price, generating an additional source of revenue. We also take into account the negative externalities of the polluting industrial sector on the regeneration capacity of the renewable resource sector. Without the usual convexity or super-modularity, we prove that the economy evolves to increase the net stock gain sometime in the future. This property ensures that in the long run. The economy is very close to a steady state. We also establish the conditions that ensure that the economy converges in the long run. For sustainable development, one of the most difficult problems related to the criteria of the social welfare function is the reconciliation between equality and efficiency. The Axiom of Anonymity states that social order is invariant to information about individual orders. The Pareto axiom dictates that if at least one generation increases its utility, social welfare must improve. However, no SWF satisfies both the anonymity and Pareto axioms. To overcome this difficulty, some authors propose several approaches to mitigate these axioms. Consequently, many criteria have been introduced, such as: dominance, weak dominance, weak pareto, monotonicity, etc. In the second chapter of my thesis, we revisited some properties of a SWF in the literature, taking into account the continuity of this SWF under different topologies. Moreover, we propose the notions of weak and strong non-dictatorship of the present and future in the spirit of Chichilniski, and provide a detailed description of the parameters characterizing the two non-dictatorships. In chapter 3, we study an inter-temporal optimization problem using a criterion that is a combination of the Ramsey and Rawls criteria. A detailed description of the behavior of the economy over time is provided.[...] The last chapter develops a theoretical model to access the determinants of the efficiency of the Special Economic Zone and the conditions for its implementation. The results of this study show that there is a threshold such that for all initial economies of a country above this level, it will be optimal to invest in new technologies. Moreover, several factors including the price of technology capital, the wage of highly skilled labor, the initial income of the economy, and total factor productivity in the SEZ sector endogenously determine this threshold.

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This thesis deals with the economic analysis of conflicts, and more particularly with the contribution of a method called "Contest Theory". Starting from the simple postulate that economic agents perform a butter-canon trade-off, conflicts could be integrated into the field of economic analysis. In the first chapter, we provide a synthesis of the main results and describe the decisive role of Contest Success Functions in this theoretical framework. The second chapter shows that, in order to deal with armed conflicts, the institutional identity of agents should be taken into account more in the models of Contest Theory. The third chapter focuses on the motivations that can explain the arms trade between enemies. We show that if the seller has more effective military and non-military technology than the buyer, the arms trade can be mutually beneficial. In the fourth chapter we propose to estimate and compare the four largest forms of Contest Success Functions using data from the virtual world. From a sample of 1957 battles, we find that the ratio form has the highest predictive quality. In other words, the main factor explaining victory on a (virtual) battlefield is the ratio of the number of guns deployed.

Procedural standards are likely to affect the strategies implemented by the parties to a dispute. We study their impact on the volume of litigation and on the amount of expenses incurred by the parties in order to win the case. These two components of the social cost of litigation are at the heart of the challenges that developed countries face in ensuring the effectiveness of substantive law. Our work focuses in particular on the rules of evidence, and we emphasize the opposition between civil law and common law rules.After having defined the contours and the stakes of our subject in the general introduction, we develop a plan in two parts. The first part deals with the behaviour of the parties when they have the possibility of reaching an agreement. Strategic and optimistic models are developed to understand the decisions to go to court and to negotiate. The second part focuses on the process of evidence production that precedes the final hearing. We use rent-seeking models to analyze the incentives of parties to incur expenses.The results suggest that the rules of evidence have a considerable impact on the social cost of litigation. We show that the volume of litigation in France and the United States can be explained by the different rules of evidence that apply in these two countries. Our analysis also reveals that rules of evidence are a major determinant of the private cost of litigation and of defendants' defense strategies.

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Consumers have bounded rationality and are subject to various cognitive biases. The thesis studies the consequences of rationality biases on consumer behavior and the implications for consumer policy. Each of the three chapters of the thesis is devoted to a particular bias (quality overestimation, utility anticipation errors, projection bias) in a given competitive context. The first two chapters are built on standard duopoly models to which rationality biases are incorporated: the first is a duopoly with horizontal differentiation inspired by Dixit (1979), while the second considers a vertical differentiation model adapted from Gabszewicz & Thisse (1979). The third chapter extends to three periods the projection bias model proposed by Loewenstein et al. (2003). I conclude that, while cognitive biases may lead to suboptimal choices in some cases (Chapters 1 and 2), naive consumers may also have an advantage over sophisticated agents (Chapter 3). This finding argues for a detailed and measured intervention in the market. Finally, policy recommendations are formulated: I advocate a renewed approach to consumer law, which would no longer be based primarily on consumer information but more on cognitive remedies. Examples of concrete measures are discussed throughout the thesis.

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The accelerating pace of technological innovation and pressures from civil society are two major challenges for tort law. This thesis studies the incentive effects of civil liability on the prevention behavior of companies in this context. Our contribution aims, in particular, to deepen the traditional analysis of corporate liability on the one hand, and on the other hand to assess to what extent non-statutory sanctions play a role alongside this legal framework. First, we highlight the evolution of the economic analysis of liability. Then we study civil liability in a theoretical model, with the contribution of assessing the incentive effects of the legal concept of causation. Then, we examine how the difficulties in predicting accident risks affect the incentives provided by civil liability, through a theoretical model on the one hand, and through a laboratory experiment on the other. We develop in a theoretical model an analysis of the role of non-legal sanctions, emanating from civil society, alongside tort liability. We show that the incentives provided by consumer boycotts on the prevention behavior of companies are limited. Finally, we complement this model with an empirical study, and investigate the extent and determinants of the consumer boycott phenomenon in Europe.

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We study an infinite-horizon sequential dynamic game where the players are a government and an international terrorist organization. We provide conditions for the existence of equilibria in which the terrorists’ resources are totally destroyed by a government’s strike. Specifically, we study strong eradication equilibria in which the government’s strike annihilates the terrorists’ resources, preventing the terrorists from acting. We also pay attention to weak eradication equilibria in which the terrorists’ resources are destroyed but in which the initial value of the terrorists’ strike is nevertheless positive. We also show the existence of an equilibrium in which war is perpetual between the government and the terrorists. Perpetual war can only coexist with weak eradication equilibria. For these cases, we provide conditions under which the government would be better off in a weak eradication equilibrium.

Numerous papers show how game theory can improve our understanding of literature. There is no paper, however, using experimental economics to arrive at a new understanding of a play. We fill this gap by using experimental evidence to compare the last two versions of Moliere's Tartuffe. In the final version of the play, there are two stag hunt games, one without pre-game communication and one with. In the first game players fail to coordinate to the efficient equilibrium but in the second one they do, which is consistent with experimental evidence. In the penultimate version of the play, there is pre-game communication in the first stag hunt game but players fail to coordinate to the efficient equilibrium, which is not consistent with experimental evidence. By removing the pre-game communication from the first game, Moliere adapted his play as if he had been a student of modern behavioral game theory.

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The purpose of this thesis is to analyze how competition policy can be used to improve purchasing power by generating price decreases and affecting income distribution. The evaluation of the welfare consequences of the entry of new competitors on a market has been the subject of a large literature. But it is based on partial equilibrium analyses and a complementary approach in terms of general equilibrium may be useful. Other analyses of competition policy in general equilibrium terms have been carried out for economies with increasing returns to scale, but since it seems questionable whether sectors with increasing returns to scale are the majority in real economies, it seems relevant to analyze the effects of entry in "convex" economies. We thus use simple general equilibrium models to study the consequences of competition policy - in terms of entry, mergers, etc. - on welfare. - on welfare. In order to analyze its distributional effects, we consider economies composed of agents that differ in the nature of the factors they offer. In particular, we assume that one of them provides an exogenous quantity of labor, which we then endogenize. We thus show that competition policy can be conflicting: it may not impact all consumers in the same way and may benefit some to the detriment of others.

The term "transfer pricing" refers to the price of transactions concluded between subsidiaries of the same multinational enterprise. The thesis deals, from an essentially normative point of view, with the problem of regulating these prices, i.e. determining the optimal way to share the profit of a group between its subsidiaries. The thesis first shows the effect of transfer pricing regulation on firms' production and investment decisions, and then on global welfare. On the basis of the results obtained, the objectives that a benevolent international dictator should assign to this type of regulation are then established. This double work allows us to draw the outline of an optimal regulation project, based on the concept of inter-nation equity, and whose application would lead to assigning to each subsidiary its Shapley value in a previously defined game. The thesis also sheds light on the contemporary debate by proposing a protocol for comparing the arm's length principle with the lump sum allocation method.

We analyze through the prism of general economic equilibrium theory the consequences of the opening of new markets, such as emission rights, instituted in the framework of climate change mitigation and adaptation policies. In the first chapter we introduce a theoretical framework for the analysis: an economy with extemalities and increasing returns. We establish an index formula and obtain as a corollary the existence of general pricing equilibria. In the second chapter, the opening of a rights market appears as a disturbance of this initial equilibrium situation. We then describe the changes in firms' choices that guarantee the existence of an equilibrium in the extended economy. In the third chapter, we analyze the influence of the opening of the rights market on the Pareto optimality of marginal pricing equilibria in the economy. It turns out that Pareto optima can be decentralized thanks to the fact that by setting a maximum level of pollution, the government provides the economy with a free public good consisting of the difference between this level and the situation prevailing under laissez-faire. In the last chapter, we extend the Pareto Optima decentralization problem to the case where the production capacities taken into account in the definition of optimality differ from those perceived by firms. This framework is developed to account for the apparently divergent expectations of firms and governments about the economic consequences of climate change.

Secession is understood here as the action taken by a part of the population of a political jurisdiction to separate from it in order to form another jurisdiction of the same competence as the first. A political jurisdiction is a territorially identified group of individuals who finance and share a common public good. The notion of jurisdiction is similar to that of political sovereignty. Under the hypothesis of a multiplicity of public goods, the secession thus defined allows a jurisdiction to acquire a certain autonomy (only certain public goods are concerned) or its independence (all political decisions fall under the new jurisdiction). In addition to the introduction and conclusion, this thesis has four chapters. The first is a review of the literature. The next chapters are three original models. These aim to highlight some of the mechanisms that contribute to secession in a country composed of two regions with exogenous borders. The heterogeneity of the population is the centrifugal force that drives political fragmentation in a democratic context. It is opposed to various centripetal forces that induce the centralization of political decisions, such as economies of scale in the production of public goods, the size of the national market determining individual income, etc.

This thesis, which consists of two parts, consists in understanding not only individual reactions in a risky environment but also their impact on the macroeconomic equilibrium. In the first part, we distinguish two research approaches: on the one hand, the standard approach of Von Neumann and Morgenstern. On the other hand, representations of the Kreps and Porteus type that allow us to introduce preferences with respect to the date of resolution of the uncertainty and to separate the notions of risk aversion and intertemporal substitution. We then propose an application of these preferences to the study of risk sharing in a production economy with uncertain returns. In fact, we find that the results do not really differ from those existing in a pure exchange economy. Finally, following the work of Leland (1968), we analyze the saving behavior of individuals faced with both income and return risks. Using the notion of prudence, we show that their reaction depends on the relative importance of these two risks. In the second part, we show the relevance of the precautionary motive in the analysis of the macroeconomic equilibrium. Using two studies, we show that additional conditions to those usual in partial equilibrium are required for aggregate precautionary savings to be formed in equilibrium. Moreover, other conditions are also required, notably on the factors of production, for the precautionary effect to prevail in equilibrium. By emphasizing the importance of the concept of precaution in the analysis of behavior, this thesis helps to show that this concept plays a significant role in explaining capital accumulation.

We focus on issues of economic policy credibility. We first review the literature on the selection of credible economic policies in a democracy. Then, we study under which conditions a European central bank that depends on national states for its economic information can be truly independent. Then, we study the concept of equilibrium with economically rational expectations. Then, we try to clarify the difference between tc1 and tc0 policies and the difference between time-consistent policies and game theory. Finally, we propose an explanation for the simultaneous decline in capital and direct investment tax rates in developing countries during the 1980s.