L HARIDON Olivier

Introduction Rural areas are considered safe havens against the increased spread of COVID-19 and associated restrictive measures, especially in contexts where public authorities are not in a position to systematically and substantially ease COVID-19-induced economic shocks. In the current sub-Saharan Africa context, still marked by uncertainty surrounding the spread of COVID-19, we present the protocol of an ongoing longitudinal study aimed at investigating COVID-19-related attitudes, risks perceptions, preventive behaviours and economic impact in rural areas in Senegal. Methods and analysis A prospective randomised longitudinal study of 600 households located in three semiurban villages and nine randomly selected rural villages in the Niakhar area (located 135 km East of Dakar). Three ad hoc phone surveys are administered to 600 heads of households, their housewives in charge of managing the household and a relative living temporarily in the household, respectively. In addition to sharing identical sets of questions on several topics (risks perceptions, attitudes to curfew, attitudes to vaccines, beliefs about COVID-19 infection), the three separate survey questionnaires also include other topics (economic impact, local preventive strategies) whose related questions differ between questionnaires. As analysing evolutions is the study's primary focus, data on all the topics covered will be collected in three waves unless the spread of COVID-19 by mid-2021 justifies extending data collection. The present article presents the study protocol and details about the implementation of the first wave of data collection which started in July 2020. The decision to wait before presenting the protocol was based on the unprecedented context the COVID-19 pandemic. Ethics and dissemination The survey's protocol was approved by the Senegalese National Ethical Committee for Research in Health (131/MSAS/CNERS/Sec) and received authorisation from both the Senegalese Ministry of Health (619/MSAS/DPRS/DR) and the French Commission on Information Technology and Liberties (CNIL 2220771). © Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2021. Re-use permitted under CC BY-NC. No commercial re-use. See rights and permissions. Published by BMJ.

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Background The outbreak of COVID-19 has been a major interrupting event, challenging how societies and individuals deal with risk. An essential determinant of the virus’ spread is a series of individual decisions, such as wearing face masks in public space. Those decisions depend on trade-offs between costs (or benefits) and risks, and beliefs are key to explain these. Methods We elicit beliefs about the COVID-19 pandemic during lockdown in France by means of surveys asking French citizens about their belief of the infection fatality ratio (IFR) for COVID-19, own risk to catch the disease, risk as perceived by others, and expected prevalence rate. Those self-assessments were measured twice during lockdown: about 2 weeks after lockdown started and about 2 weeks before lockdown ended. We also measured the quality of these beliefs with respect to available evidence at the time of the surveys, allowing us to assess the calibration of beliefs based on risk-related socio-demographics. Finally, comparing own risk to expected prevalence rates in the two successive surveys provides a dynamic view of comparative optimism with respect to the disease. Results The risk perceptions are rather high in absolute terms and they increased between the two surveys. We found no evidence for an impact of personal experience with COVID-19 on beliefs and lower risk perceptions of the IFR when someone in the respondent’s family has been diagnosed with a disease. Answers to survey 1 confirmed this pattern with a clear indication that respondents were optimistic about their chances to catch COVID-19. However, in survey 2, respondents revealed comparative pessimism. Conclusion The results show that respondents overestimated the probabilities to catch or die from COVID-19, which is not unusual and does not necessarily reflect a strong deviation from rational behavior. While a rational model explains why the own risk to catch COVID-19 rose between the two surveys, it does not explain why the subjective assessment of the IFR remained stable. The comparative pessimism in survey 2 was likely due to a concomitant increase in the respondents’ perceived chances to catch the disease and a decreased expected prevalence rate.

The effectiveness of public action is a growing concern for the authorities, who are increasingly calling on the results of economic science research. The contribution of this research to the development of public policies lies in its ability to analyze and understand the way in which economic actors react to changes in the environment in which they make their decisions. This reasoning is based on strong behavioral hypotheses, which are the subject of a new stream of research, behavioral economics, which combines psychology and economics in order to refine our understanding of the determinants of decisions. This book provides an overview of the contributions of this new trend to the definition and evaluation of public policies. It describes new intervention tools, such as nudges, while highlighting the relevance of traditional intervention tools. It proposes an application in health economics, savings and retirement choices, environmental policy and labor market regulation.

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As Covid-19 spreads across the world, governments turn a hopeful eye towards research and development of a vaccine against this new disease. But it is one thing to make a vaccine available, and it is quite another to convince the public to take the shot, as the precedent of the 2009 H1N1 influenza illustrated. In this paper, we present the results of four online surveys conducted in April 2020 in representative samples of the French population 18 years of age and over (N = 5018). These surveys were conducted during a period when the French population was on lockdown and the daily number of deaths attributed to the virus reached its peak. We found that if a vaccine against the new coronavirus became available, almost a quarter of respondents would not use it. We also found that attitudes to this vaccine were correlated significantly with political partisanship and engagement with the political system. Attitudes towards this future vaccine did not follow the traditional mapping of political attitudes along a Left-Right axis. The rift seems to be between people who feel close to governing parties (Centre, Left and Right) on the one hand, and, on the other, people who feel close to Far-Left and Far-Right parties as well as people who do not feel close to any party. We draw on the French sociological literature on ordinary attitudes to politics to discuss our results as well as the cultural pathways via which political beliefs can affect perceptions of vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic. © 2020 Elsevier Ltd.

Quality-Adjusted Life-Years (QALYs) are typically derived from individual preferences over health episodes. This paper reports the first experimental investigation into the effects of collective decision making on health valuations, using both time trade-off (TTO) and standard gamble (SG) tasks. We investigated collective decision making in dyads, by means of a mixed-subjects design where we control for learning effects. Our data suggest that collective decision making has little effect on decision quality, as no effects were observed on decision consistency and monotonicity for both methods. Furthermore, QALY weights remained similar between individual and collective decisions, and the typical difference in elicited weights between TTO and SG was not affected. These findings suggest that consulting with others has little effect on health state valuation, although learning may have. Additionally, our findings add to the literature of the effect of collective decision making, suggesting that no such effect occurs for TTO and SG.

We obtain rich measurements of risk preferences for 2939 subjects across 30 countries, and use the data to paint a picture of the distribution of risk preferences across the globe using structural equation models. Reference-dependence and likelihood-dependence are found to be important everywhere. Model parameters in non-Western countries differ systematically from those in Western countries, with poorer countries substantially more risk tolerant than rich countries on average. We qualify previous findings on gender effects and cognitive ability by showing how they mainly impact likelihood-dependence. We further add novel evidence on the correlation between risk preferences and study major. Whereas we confirm previous results on observable characteristics of subjects explaining little of overall preference heterogeneity, a few macroeconomic indicators can explain a considerable part of the between-country heterogeneity.

This Handbook provides an overview of the experimental methods used in economics. These methods have been developed to observe the behavior of "economic agents" in situations that replicate those in which the economist is interested, but in a controlled environment. On this basis, the tools presented in this booklet make it possible to test the predictions and empirical content of economic theory, to bring to light new stylized facts about the functioning of situations poorly understood by theory, or to inform public policy-making. This wide range of objectives explains why these methods have become very common in applied economics, and why their use has spread beyond economics to fields such as marketing, management, and so on. The book presents a detailed treatment of the main tools available to measure different aspects of economic behavior: individual decisions under certainty and uncertainty, intertemporal choices, strategic interactions, social preferences and resource allocation mechanisms. The book also presents the methodological criteria for assessing the theoretical and empirical relevance of the data collected using these tools.

This Handbook provides an overview of the experimental methods used in economics. These methods have been developed to observe the behavior of "economic agents" in situations that replicate those in which the economist is interested, but in a controlled environment. On this basis, the tools presented in this booklet make it possible to test the predictions and empirical content of economic theory, to bring to light new stylized facts about the functioning of situations poorly understood by theory, or to inform public policy-making. This wide range of objectives explains why these methods have become very common in applied economics, and why their use has spread beyond economics to fields such as marketing, management, and so on. The book presents a detailed treatment of the main tools available to measure different aspects of economic behavior: individual decisions under certainty and uncertainty, intertemporal choices, strategic interactions, social preferences and resource allocation mechanisms. The book also presents the methodological criteria for assessing the theoretical and empirical relevance of the data collected using these tools.

Over the past two decades, experimental economics has moved from a fringe activity to become a standard tool for empirical research. With experimental economics now regarded as part of the basic tool-kit for applied economics, this book demonstrates how controlled experiments can be a useful in providing evidence relevant to economic research. Professors Jacquemet and L'Haridon take the standard model in applied econometrics as a basis to the methodology of controlled experiments. Methodological discussions are illustrated with standard experimental results. This book provides future experimental practitioners with the means to construct experiments that fit their research question, and new comers with an understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of controlled experiments. Graduate students and academic researchers working in the field of experimental economics will be able to learn how to undertake, understand and criticise empirical research based on lab experiments, and refer to specific experiments, results or designs completed with case study applications.

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We investigate univariate and multivariate risk preferences for health (longevity) and wealth. We measure attitudes toward correlation and attitudes toward higher order dependence structures such as cross-prudence and cross-temperance, making use of the risk apportionment technique proposed by Eeckhoudt et al. (2007). For multivariate gains, we find correlation aversion and cross-prudence in longevity and wealth. For losses, we observe correlation seeking and cross-imprudence. We do not find clear evidence for cross-temperance. Our results indicate that longevity and wealth are considered to be substitutes for gains, but not for losses. Second, univariate (higher order) risk preferences are comparable for longevity and wealth, although somewhat closer to linearity for wealth. Third, we find evidence that attitudes toward dependence structures in the health domain are sign-dependent.

This paper studies the effect of learning information on people’s attitudes toward ambiguity. We propose a method to separate ambiguity attitudes from subjective probabilities and to decompose ambiguity attitudes into two components. Under models like prospect theory that represent ambiguity through nonadditive decision weights, these components reflect pessimism and likelihood insensitivity. Under multiple priors models, they reflect ambiguity aversion and perceived ambiguity. We apply our method in an experiment where we elicit the ask prices of options with payoffs depending on the returns of initial public offerings (IPOs) on the New York Stock Exchange. IPOs are a natural context to study the effect of learning, as prior information about their returns is unavailable. Subjects perceived substantial ambiguity and they were insensitive to likelihood information. We observed only little pessimism and ambiguity aversion. Subjective probabilities were well calibrated and close to the true frequencies. Subjects’ behavior moved toward expected utility with more information, but substantial deviations remained even in the maximum information condition.

This paper studies whether measured risk attitudes and athletic success are related. We measured the risk preferences of the players of the Dutch men’s field hockey team, the reigning European champions, and runners‐up in the 2012 Olympics and in the 2014 World Championships, andcompared those with a matched sample of recreational hockey players. We had the rare opportunity to interview each professional individually. Our measurements were based on prospect theory. We disentangled the various components of risk attitudes using a parameter‐free method that makes it possible to completely observe prospect theory without imposing simplifying assumptions and that captures individual heterogeneity. The professionals were more optimistic for gains than the nonprofessionals: they overweighted the probability of winning compared with the non‐professional group. Utility curvature (diminishing sensitivity) and loss aversion were very close in the two groups. As probabilities were given, the difference in optimism was not due to inaccurate beliefs. It was also unrelated to differences in overconfidence or in venturesomeness and impulsivity, two psychological traits associated with risk taking. Our findings indicate that success in sports may be related to differences in optimism. They are consistent with previous findings that optimistic people are more successful and that optimism may be associated with better outcomes.

This article focuses on the effect of the transition to retirement on health. On the basis of a dual analysis of the theoretical and empirical literature, we attempt to identify the main channels through which the transition to retirement can influence health status. On the theoretical level, we show to what extent individuals have an interest in investing or disinvesting in their health over the life cycle and to what extent the passage to retirement influences the evolution of this health capital. A review of the international empirical literature highlights the difficulty of measuring the impact of retirement on health, notably because of biases in the measurement of health states and the existence of possible reverse causality. Using the 2013-2016 Employment Surveys, we illustrate the difficulty of identifying the impact of retirement on the health of individuals. Our results highlight a positive effect of retirement on self-reported health status.

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Ambiguity attitudes have been prominently used in economic models, but we still know little about their demographic correlates or their generalizability beyond the West. We analyse the ambiguity attitudes of almost 3000 students across 30 countries. For gains we find ambiguity aversion everywhere, while ambiguity aversion is much weaker for losses. Ambiguity attitudes change systematically with probabilitiesfor both gains and losses. Much of the between-country variation can be explained through a few macroeconomic characteristics. In contrast, we find massive unexplained variation at the individual level. We also find much unexplained heterogeneity in individual responses to different decision tasks.

This study compares discounting for money and health in a field study. We applied the direct method, which measures discounting independent of utility, in a representative French sample, interviewed at home by professional interviewers. We found more discounting for money than for health. The median discount rates (6.5% for money and 2.2 % for health) were close to market interest rates suggesting that the direct method solves the puzzle of unrealistically high discount rates typically observed in applied economics. Constant discounting fitted the data better than hyperbolic discounting. The substantial individual heterogeneity in discounting could be explained by age and occupation.

In most medical decisions probabilities are ambiguous and not objectively known.Empirical evidence suggests that people’s preferences are affected by ambiguity. Health economic analyses generally ignore ambiguity preferences and assume that they are the same as preferences under risk. We show how health preferences can be measured under ambiguity and we compare them with health preferences under risk. We assume a general ambiguity model that includes many of the ambiguity models that have been proposed in the literature. For health gains, ambiguity preferences and risk preferences were indeed the same. For health losses they differed with subjects being more pessimistic in decision under ambiguity. Utility and loss aversion were the same for risk and ambiguity.

The purpose of this thesis is to present four essays in behavioral and experimental economics on decision making under risk and ambiguity. The first essay provides a synthesis and perspective on the representativeness of experimental results on preferences: social preferences and preferences regarding risk and time in developed and developing countries. The second essay experimentally explores the effect of risk and ambiguity on infinite horizon job search behavior. The results show that under risk and ambiguity, reservation wages are lower than theoretical values and decrease during the search process. Similarly, subjects behave as ambiguity neutral agents. The third and fourth trials investigate the effect of social context and the correlation of payments on attitudes toward risk and ambiguity in the gain, loss, and mixed domains, respectively. The results show that the introduction of social context has a significant effect on risk attitudes in all three domains. Nevertheless, risk correlation has an effect on risk attitudes only in the mixed domain. Attitudes toward ambiguity vary by domain. Similarly, correlation of payments decreases ambiguity aversion.

We propose a simple, parameter‐free method that, for the first time, makes it possible to completely observe Tversky and Kahneman’s (1992) prospect theory. While methods existed to measure event weighting and the utility for gains and losses separately, there was no method to measure loss aversion under ambiguity. Our method allows this and thereby it can measure prospect theory’s entire utility function. Consequently, we can properly identify properties of utility and perform new tests of prospect theory. We implemented our method in an experiment and obtained support for prospect theory. Utility was concave for gains and convex for losses and there was substantial loss aversion. Both utility and loss aversion were the same for risk and ambiguity, as assumed by prospect theory, and sign‐comonotonic trade‐off consistency, the central condition of prospect theory, held.

The last twenty-five years have seen a revival of empirical methods in many areas of economic analysis. Among these, an increasingly important place has been given to the use of experimental methods, in particular as a privileged empirical tool for studying the new perspectives offered by behavioral economics. The expansion of empirical methods that has followed this movement, and the accumulation of a number of significant results, has led Economic News to propose an overview of this literature, not only to present its premises and draw an intermediate assessment, but also to present its perspectives. Strictly speaking, the methods of experimental economics employ the principles of the experimental method, inspired by the natural sciences, to evaluate the predictions of economic models by focusing more particularly on individual behaviour. The pillars on which this method is based are traditionally three in number. The first pillar is the control of the environment in which individual choices are made. In a laboratory experiment, the researcher tries to control as much as possible the context in which economic agents make their decisions, in order to isolate the effect of a particular treatment. Typically, the experimental method makes it possible to specify in a fine and precise manner the institutions of exchange and the form of social interactions, the modes of presentation of choices and the scales of response in order to best control the choice environment. The second pillar is the control of the random assignment of participants to different treatments. This second pillar is fundamental to the identification of treatment effects and the underlying empirical evaluation that is hoped for. The third and most contested pillar relies on the presence of monetary incentives to ensure that choices made in the laboratory are associated with real economic consequences.

This paper performs several tests of decision analysis applied to the health domain. First, we conduct a test of the normative expected utility theory. Second, we investigate the possibility to elicit the more general prospect theory. We observe risk aversion for gains and losses and violations of expected utility. These results imply that mechanisms governing decisions in the health domain are similar to those in the monetary domain. However, we also report one important deviation: utility is universally concave for the health outcomes used in this study, in contrast to the commonly found S-shaped utility for monetary outcomes, with concave utility for gains and convex utility for losses.

We present experimental evidence regarding individual and group decisions over time. Static and longitudinal methods are combined to test four conditions on time preferences: impatience, stationarity, age independence, and dynamic consistency. Decision making in groups should favor coordination via communication about voting intentions. We find that individuals are neither patient nor consistent, that groups are both patient and highly consistent, and that information exchange between participants helps groups converge to stable decisions. Finally we provide additional evidence showing that our results are driven by the specific role of groups and not by either repeated choices or individual preferences when choosing for other subjects.

Over the last thirty years, the traditional approach to choice under uncertainty, expected utility theory with subjective probabilities, has been widely criticized and discussed. One of the fundamental criticisms lies in the inability of the traditional approach to take into account the attitude towards ambiguity in individual choices. In order to overcome these deficiencies, many theoretical alternatives to expected utility under uncertainty have ́et ́e proposed. These decision models under ambiguity thus provide various representations of the limited confidence that an economic agent may have in her beliefs. In this paper, we provide an overview of this literature, its theoretical contributions and the experimental evaluations performed to judge the empirical relevance of the described models. We show that, as they stand, ambiguity models are characterized by their diversity and, although no consensus has yet emerged, their major strength comes from the role they give to beliefs in economic analysis.

The thesis aims to establish optimal technology risk management to ensure hazard reduction of new emerging risks, without impeding the innovation pathway. The research contributes to ex-ante and ex-post risk management strategies and provides theoretical and empirical evidence to address the management of new emerging risks. The first part of the thesis examines, from a legal and economic perspective, the effectiveness of the rule of civil liability when the decision-maker lacks information about the probability of an event. The second part of the thesis pays particular attention to the energy transition in France to focus on the insurability of energy performance in the housing sector. The theoretical and experimental results of the first part of the research attest to a strong empirical validity that tort law cannot provide optimal ex-ante incentives in the absence of information on the probability of an accident. Both unlimited and limited liability regimes lead to an overinvestment in prevention relative to newly emerging risks. The empirical results of the second part of the thesis reveal that 23.75% of the households, which participated in the renovation program "Je Rénove BBC", cannot reach the expected energy target, but the magnitude of the energy performance gap is relatively small. The research results imply several policy recommendations for managing new emerging technologies in the future.

We take the wage announcement approach with job search to study three problems in the labor market. The first problem concerns the premature termination of workers. Such premature work stoppage creates turnover risks for firms, so firms want to offer wage profiles to minimize these risks. In this problem, asymmetric information plays an important role. We adopt a mechanism design approach and consider the different timings at which private information is realized. In a follow-up paper, we propose a specific Age policy by which this inefficiency can be mitigated, and study its implication on welfare and aggregate output. In the second problem, we revisit the welfare analysis of the impact of discrimination on skill choice under a multidimensional hiring standard along characteristics that are either productivity-related or productivity-independent. We show how strategic skill investment between the favored and discriminated group arises. We also compare two wage determination mechanisms (advertised and negotiated wage) to check the robustness of results. In the third problem, we consider the extent to which the unemployment benefit and the minimum wage can correct inefficient allocations arising from the market power of firms. Our context concerns small markets where the ratio of workers to firms is not large. The market imperfection arises from the fact that in the small-scale labor market firms pay less than the competitive wage level. We proceed from an industrial organization point of view, and propose focusing on the misallocation of employment and surplus when analyzing the effectiveness of the policy instrument.

The problematic of the thesis is the low rate of social coverage in the Algerian labor market. 73% of the employed population in the private sector is not affiliated with social security according to the employment survey of the National Statistics Office (ONS, 2013). The objective of the thesis is to understand the reasons for this low social security coverage. The analysis of the Algerian social security system shows its capacity to provide social coverage to all categories of the employed population. However, the demand for social insurance remains low. The literature shows that the demand for social insurance is closely linked to consumer behavior over the life cycle. The most discussed behaviors in a social insurance context are: intertemporal choices, risk aversion, and social orientations. These variables, along with other socioeconomic and demographic variables, are the key variables in this thesis. We measure them through an experimental survey of 654 workers. We use lottery games to measure risk aversion and intertemporal choices. We implement the most explicit form of the dictatorship game to measure respondents' degrees of altruism. Our survey measures other characteristic variables that encourage debate. Analysis of the survey results shows the significant impact of these variables on the demand for social insurance.

This paper is the first to apply prospect theory to societal health-related decision making. In particular, we allow for utility curvature, equity weighting, sign-dependence, and loss aversion in choices concerning quality of life of other people. We find substantial inequity aversion, both for gains and losses, which can be attributed to both diminishing marginal utility and differential weighting of better-off and worse-off. There are also clear framing effects, which violate expected utility. Moreover, we observe loss aversion, indicating that subjects give more weight to one group's loss than another group's gain of the same absolute magnitude. We also elicited some information on the effect of the age of the studied group. The amount of inequity aversion is to some extent influenced by the age of the considered patients. In particular, more inequity aversion is observed for gains of older people than gains of younger people.

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Behavioral economics and experimental economics have grown tremendously in recent decades. The objective of this article is to present, through a general framework of analysis and examples of applications, the interest of experimental economics for the evaluation of public policies on the labor market. Experimental economics and existing alternative methods appear to be complementary analytical tools in the study of public policies. In particular, the results of experimental economics shed critical light on the theoretical models underlying the study of labor market policies.

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The nature of utility is controversial. Whereas decision theory commonly assumes that utility is context specific, applied and empirical decision analysis typically assumes one unifying concept of utility applicable to all decision problems. This controversy has hardly been addressed empirically because of the absence of methods to measure utility outside the context of risk. We introduce a method to measure utility over time and compare utility under risk and utility over time. We distinguish between gains and losses and also measure loss aversion. In two experiments we found that utility under risk and utility over time differed and were uncorrelated. Utility under risk was more curved than utility over time. Subjects were loss averse both for risk and for time, but loss aversion was more pronounced for risk. Loss aversion over risk and time were uncorrelated. This suggests that loss aversion, although important in both decision contexts, is volatile and subject to framing.

Allowing for sign-dependence in discounting substantially improves the description of people's time preferences. The deviations from constant discounting that we observed were more pronounced for losses than for gains. Our data also suggest that the discount function should be flexible enough to allow for increasing impatience. These findings challenge the current practice in modeling intertemporal choice where sign-dependence is largely ignored and only decreasing impatience is allowed. The sign-dependent model of Loewenstein and Prelec (1992) with the constant sensitivity discount function of Ebert and Prelec (2007) provided the best fit to our data.

In this article, we use a stylized model of the labor market to investigate the effects of three alternative and well-known bargaining solutions. We apply the Nash, the Egalitarian and the Kalai-Smorodinsky bargaining solutions in the small firm's matching model of unemployment. First, we show that the Egalitarian and the Kalai-Smorodinsky solutions are easily implementable within search-matching economies. Second, our results show that even though the traditional results of bargaining theory apply in the context of search-matching economies, they are quantitatively weaker than expected compared to the results established in the earlier literature. In addition, and excluding a model with on-the-job search, it appears that the policy implications of labor taxes and employment protection are not very sensitive to the choice of the bargaining solution.

It is well-known that expected utility (EU) has empirical deficiencies. Cumulative prospect, theory (CPT) has developed as an alternative with more descriptive validity. However, CPT's full, function had not yet been quantified in the health domain. This paper is therefore the first to, simultaneously measure utility of life duration, probability weighting, and loss aversion in this domain., We observe loss aversion and risk aversion for gains and losses, which for gains can be explained by, probabilistic pessimism. Utility for gains is almost linear. For losses, we find less weighting of, probability 1/2 and concave utility. This contrasts with the common finding of convex utility for, monetary losses. However, CPT was proposed to explain choices among lotteries involving monetary, outcomes. Life years are arguably very different from monetary outcomes and need not generate, convex utility for losses. Moreover, utility of life duration reflects discounting, causing concave utility.

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It is well-known that expected utility (EU) has empirical deficiencies. Prospect theory (PT) has developed as an alternative with more descriptive validity. However, PT’s full function had not yet been quantified in the health domain. This paper is the first to simultaneously measure utility of life duration, probability weighting, and loss aversion for health. We observe loss aversion and risk aversion, which for gains can be explained by probabilistic pessimism. Utility for gains is almost linear. For losses, we find less weighting of probability 1/2 and concave utility. This contrasts with the common finding of convex utility for monetary losses. However, PT was proposed to explain choices among lotteries involving small outcomes. Life years are arguably not ‘small’ and need not generate convex utility for losses. Moreover, utility of life duration reflects discounting, causing concave utility. These results are a first step in fitting non-EU models for health-related decisions.

Background: Tobacco control policies have succeeded in reducing tobacco use, but the negative correlation between smoking prevalence and socioeconomic status (SES) has increased. This study focused on the relationships between time preferences, SES, and smoking behaviour, attitudes and risk awareness. Methods: A cross-sectional telephone survey was conducted in France in 2008 on a representative national sample of people aged 18-75 (N = 2000, including 621 smokers) years. Two scales measuring planning horizon and impulsivity and various indicators of SES were introduced into the logistic regressions performed on smoking status and smokers' attitudes to anti-smoking campaigns, quitting attempts, attempts to quit or smoke less, fear of smoking-related cancer and risk perception. Results: Indicators of lower SES and smoking status were correlated with present time orientation and impulsivity. On modelling smoking status, time orientation and lower SES were found to be significant predictors. Among smokers, lower SES and present time orientation were predictive of smoking-related outcomes: little personal concern with anti-tobacco campaigns, not reporting recent behavioural changes, not expressing personal fear of smoking-related cancer and low risk awareness. When time-related preferences were introduced into the analysis, the effects of several lower SES indicators (especially a low educational level) became non-significant. Conclusion: The relationship between SES and smoking behaviour, attitudes and beliefs may be partly mediated by time preferences. Time preference is strongly correlated with smoking status, risk perceptions and attitudes towards anti-smoking campaigns. Tobacco control policies should include messages targeting present time-oriented smokers and/or interventions designed to enhance more future-oriented attitudes among smokers.

This thesis is composed of three chapters constituting distinct contributions but related to the same focus, the theory of decision in risk. The first chapter deals with additively separable preferences with respect to probabilities. A simple axiomatization of variational preferences represented by a functional decomposing into a utility expectation term and an entropy term is deduced. The second chapter consists of an axiomatic foundation of interdependent preferences in the presence of social interactions, based on the model initially developed by Blume, Brock and Durlauf. The third chapter raises the question of the contribution of the probabilistic model of quantum physics to decision theory and its application to take into account the subjective perception of events by individuals.

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The rise of employment policies in European labor markets over the past 25 years has been the subject of much analysis and debate. In this thesis, we consider these policies in terms of their complementarities. This notion is defined as the fact that two employment policies are complementary if the result of their joint action is superior to that of their isolated action. We focus in particular on highlighting these interactions, their consequences on the labor market in terms of employment, unemployment, wages and welfare. Particular attention is paid to the sources of possible complementarities and to their transmission channels. The first part is situated in a simple framework of labor supply and demand, in order to provide a first study of the impact of employment policies and their interactions. It also allows us to take stock of a certain number of empirical works. A second part then turns to an equilibrium approach. The latter is carried out in a matching model and allows for a more in-depth analysis of the complementarities of employment policies. This section focuses on tax and unemployment compensation policies. The third part extends the analysis to employment protection and its interactions with other employment policies on the one hand, and the macroeconomic environment on the other. In sum, this thesis aims to show that the effectiveness and consequences of an employment policy are likely to vary greatly according to the characteristics of the labor market and the other policies implemented.