Cette thèse traite des enjeux environnementaux et sanitaires de l’agriculture sous l’angle de l’économie comportementale. En partant de l’exemple emblématique fourni par la contestation sociale de l’usage des pesticides dans la filière vin, nous montrons pourquoi la réorientation durable du système productif ne peut s’affranchir d’une analyse des arbitrages effectués par les agents économiques. Du côté de la demande, nous mesurons expérimentalement l’effet concurrentiel des certifications (agriculture biologique) et des innovations technologiques (e.g. cépages résistants, réduction des sulfites) sur les préférences des consommateurs. Nous observons que ceux-ci sont prêts à revoir en partie leurs exigences gustatives en faveur d’un niveau élevé de qualité environnementale, mais que leurs motivations sont en partie liées à des attentes sanitaires, générant des signaux contradictoires pour l’offre. Le faible niveau d’information auquel ils ont accès constitue par ailleurs un frein à la sélection des meilleurs produits. Au niveau de l’offre, nous soutenons que la réponse à cette demande reste fortement limitée par l’inertie du système productif. Celle-ci peut être attribuée à une aversion au risque mais aussi, de nouveau, à un déficit informationnel, bien plus qu’à des comportements déviants liés au mimétisme, souvent incriminé en agriculture. Ce déficit porte cette fois sur les possibilités d’action de l’amont de la filière, dans notre cas les viticulteurs. Nous donnons alors des pistes d’orientation des politiques publiques de régulation, au niveau global ou au niveau plus local de la gouvernance d’entreprise, pour faciliter l’adéquation entre offre et demande sociétale. / This thesis deals with the impact of agriculture on health and the environment from a behavioural economics perspective. Focusing on the controversial use of pesticides in the winegrowing industry, I demonstrate the importance of considering the trade-offs made by economic actors in order to understand the obstacles hindering a shift to sustainable production. On the consumer side, I experimentally measure the competitive effect of certification (organic farming) and technological innovations (e.g. resistant grapevines, reduction of sulphites) on consumers’ preferences. I observe that consumers are partly willing to review their taste requirements in exchange for high environmental quality level, but that their motives are essentially health-oriented, generating contradictory signals towards producers. Besides, selecting the best products is hampered by the little information consumers are provided with. On the supply side, I argue that ability to meet demand is strongly limited by the inertia of the production system. This inertia can be attributed to risk aversion but again, to a large extent, to a lack of information, rather than being, as is often suggested in an agricultural context, the result of imitation. This lack of information this time concerns the various options available upstream, in this instance, on the part of winegrowers. I then provide guidelines for public regulatory policies, at global level or at more local level of corporate governance, to enable a match between supply and societal demand.

With the ever-increasing trend in the number of social interactions getting intermediated by technology (the world wide web) as the backdrop, this thesis focuses on the design of mechanisms for online communities (crowds) which strive to come together, albeit in ad-hoc fashion, to achieve a social objective. Two examples of such web-based social communities which are of central concern in this thesis are crowdsourcing markets and crowdfunding platforms. For these settings which involve strategic human agents, we design mechanisms that incentivize contributions (effort, funds, or information) from the crowd and aggregate these contributions to achieve the specified objective. Our work is thus concerned with the challenge of designing mechanisms which encourage social coordination and cooperation among large groups of (of-ten) anonymous users to achieve group efficiency (social welfare). We address the following four related challenges: • Can we design mechanisms to solve the free-rider problem in public goods settings? Can large anonymous groups of individuals be incentivized to contribute to create public goods? • Can we design mechanisms that harness social networks to achieve coordination of contributions towards a public good to ensure that publicly desirable goods are successfully funded via private contributions? How do we make such mechanisms fair • Can we design mechanisms that improve the efficiency of markets by expanding the set of individuals who participate in the market? Can these individuals be incentivized to increase the group efficiency and, if so, at what cost? • Can we design mechanisms that make crowdsourcing markets more equitable by offering participation opportunities to novices and higher incentives to agents with high reliability? What is the price of reliability? Using mechanism design as the principal design tool, the thesis attempts to offer rigorous solutions to the above challenges

The aim of the thesis is the analysis of valid legal regulations in the area of consumer protection during internet trading. The introduction part deals with definitions of basic concepts as are consumer and his rights, consumer protection, activities of consumer protection organizations and definitions of electronic business and internet trading etc. The basis of the thesis is the analysis of intrastate, European and international legal regulations which concern the given issue. The emphasis is, above all, put on those rights and duties which are applied mostly by internet business users. The work also deals with the process of contracting on the internet. Particularities of e-contracting have an important influence on the validity of transactions and primarily on the moment of contraction. The last part deals with internet auctions, which are gaining popularity, and thus consumers protection is also a current issue. Room for evaluation of legal preparedness in the area is given to within the whole thesis.

O aumento da participação dos títulos públicos pré-fixados no total da dívida pública sempre foi um objetivo perseguido pelas autoridades brasileiras. No entanto, isto só foi possível durante os primeiros anos do Plano Real. Muitos trabalhos empíricos foram realizados recentemente com o intuito de testar alguns pressupostos da teoria de leilões, porém, Silva (2002) foi o único trabalho realizado usando o Brasil como exemplo. O presente trabalho utiliza estatísticas mais confiáveis que Silva (2002), além de realizar testes empíricos relacionando o mercado primário de títulos públicos ao mercado secundário. A principal conclusão a que chegamos é que nos leilões de títulos públicos préfixados os pressupostos teóricos não são válidos, podendo ser fruto da pequena liquidez presente no mercado primário. / The increase of the share of fixed-rate bills in the public debt was always a goal to be pursued by the Brazilian authorities; nevertheless, this was only possible during a short period of time in the first years of the Real Plan. Many empirical works were recently elaborated with the intent to test the auction theory hypothesis, but only Silva (2002) used Brazilian data. This present dissertation uses more trustworthy figures than Silva’s work, beyond the realization of empirical tests relating the primary market to the secondary market. The most important contribution is that in the fixed rate Brazilian’s treasury auction, the estimated theoreticians do not function, and this could be due to the primary market’s low liquidity.

O aumento da participação dos títulos públicos pré-fixados no total da dívida pública sempre foi um objetivo perseguido pelas autoridades brasileiras. No entanto, isto só foi possível durante os primeiros anos do Plano Real. Muitos trabalhos empíricos foram realizados recentemente com o intuito de testar alguns pressupostos da teoria de leilões, porém, Silva (2002) foi o único trabalho realizado usando o Brasil como exemplo. O presente trabalho utiliza estatísticas mais confiáveis que Silva (2002), além de realizar testes empíricos relacionando o mercado primário de títulos públicos ao mercado secundário. A principal conclusão a que chegamos é que nos leilões de títulos públicos préfixados os pressupostos teóricos não são válidos, podendo ser fruto da pequena liquidez presente no mercado primário. / The increase of the share of fixed-rate bills in the public debt was always a goal to be pursued by the Brazilian authorities; nevertheless, this was only possible during a short period of time in the first years of the Real Plan. Many empirical works were recently elaborated with the intent to test the auction theory hypothesis, but only Silva (2002) used Brazilian data. This present dissertation uses more trustworthy figures than Silva’s work, beyond the realization of empirical tests relating the primary market to the secondary market. The most important contribution is that in the fixed rate Brazilian’s treasury auction, the estimated theoreticians do not function, and this could be due to the primary market’s low liquidity.

Orientador: Paulo de Barros Correia / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Faculdade de Engenharia Mecânica / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-21T01:54:51Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Lacorte_DeboraYamazaki_M.pdf: 3821412 bytes, checksum: 77a00f590584de1ac09d6c73af31ebc5 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2012 / Resumo: Leilões são empregados na comercialização de energia elétrica brasileira por se tratarem de mecanismos rápidos, seguros e eficientes para a alocação de bens. O objetivo do trabalho é sugerir uma possível implementação de um leilão combinatório como um mecanismo de investimento em novos empreendimentos de geração na exploração das complementaridades entre as fontes. A partir da visão de um participante do mecanismo, uma otimização de portfólio com diferentes empreendimentos de geração de energia é realizada na busca da combinação que minimize os riscos de exposição do agente ao PLD. Escolhido o portfólio ótimo, uma avaliação de lances é feita através do método de Monte Carlo na busca da distribuição dos lances prováveis no jogo, de forma a embasar a tomada de decisão do participante na competição contra seus adversários. A combinação de fontes complementares contribui na diminuição dos riscos de exposição ao preço spot, atuando principalmente numa melhora do valor de lances para agentes avessos ao risco relacionado às oscilações de preços do mercado / Abstract: Auctions are used in the Brazilian electricity market for being a rapid, safe and efficient method for allocation of goods. The objective of this work is to suggest a possible implementation of a combinatorial auction as a mechanism for investment in new generation projects by the exploitation of the existing complementarities between sources. From the perspective of a participant of the mechanism, a portfolio optimization with power plants of different sources is performed searching the combination of assets that minimizes the risks of exposure of the agent to the spot prices. After choosing the optimal portfolio, an evaluation of bids is done using the Monte Carlo method in order to find the distribution of bids that is likely to happen during the game in order to base the decision making of the participant in the competition against their opponents. The combination of complementary sources helps to reduce risks of exposure to the spot prices, working mainly in improved value bids for risk averse agents concerned with the market prices fluctuations / Mestrado / Planejamento de Sistemas Energeticos / Mestra em Planejamento de Sistemas Energéticos

[pt] Atualmente, o mundo tem se voltado à promoção do desenvolvimento da energia proveniente de fontes renováveis, pois estas aparecem como uma alternativa para a redução do aquecimento global. No Brasil, as principais fontes de geração renováveis de energia são: geração de cogeração à bagaço de cana-deaçúcar (biomassa), eólica e pequenas centrais hidrelétricas (PCH). Atualmente, o grande desafio enfrentado por elas é comercialização de contratos lastreados em perfis de geração que, apesar de exibirem um baixo fator de emissões, são extremamente sazonais e incertos. Contudo, sabe-se que existe uma relevante complementaridade entre a disponibilidade dos seus recursos (colheita da cana, vento e hidrologia), que como consequência, promove a possibilidade de um ganho sinérgico com a formação de um portfolio contendo tais fontes. A sinergia entre os perfis de geração de uma biomassa e uma PCH foi recentemente estudada através de um modelo de otimização de portfolio com aversão a risco. Esta dissertação tem dois objetivos: (i) estender o modelo de comercialização integrada de fontes renováveis para considerar também a fonte de geração eólica, e (ii) utilizá-lo para definir a estratégia ótima de oferta (compra) da comercializadora em um leilão de compra de contratos de fontes renováveis no ACL. Dois formatos de leilão serão testados e comparados tanto em termos de benefício para a comercializadora, como em termos de participação final de cada fonte. Por fim, o objetivo (ii) preenche uma lacuna na literatura correspondente a ausência de modelos de oferta estratégica avessa a risco em leilões de contratos por parte da demanda. / [en] Nowadays, the world has turned to promoting the development of energy from renewable sources, because they appear as an alternative to reducing global warming. In Brazil, the main renewable energy sources are the thermoelectric cogeneration of sugarcane bagasse (biomass), wind power and small hydro resources. Besides, the major challenge faced by them is the contracts trade guaranteed by generation profiles that, despite exhibiting a low emission factor, are highly seasonal and uncertain. However, it is known that there is an important complementarity between the availability of resources (sugar cane harvesting, wind and hydrology), which as a consequence, promotes the ability to gain a synergistic effect with the formation of a portfolio containing such sources. The synergy between the resources availability profile of biomass and a small hydro was recently studied by a model of portfolio optimization with risk aversion. This work has two objectives: (i) extend the portfolio trade model of renewable sources to consider also the a wind generation power plant, and (ii) define an optimal strategic bidding (demand side) for a trading company on a contract auction for renewable sources. Two auction formats will be tested and compared in terms of benefit to the energy trading company. Finally, the objective (ii) fills a gap in the literature corresponding to the absence of risk-averse bidding models for contract auctions on the demand side.

The present diploma thesis deals with international art trade. It is divided into four chapters. The first chapter introduces key market agents and describes briefly the art market history. It also shortly evaluates the current market situation. The second chapter describes major international art trade centers and analyses key market patterns and electronic trading. The third chapter provides overview of regulations and rules at the US, EU, and Chinese art markets. The last chapter compares investment into art with selected other investment options. This chapter includes also a case study concerning Picasso's late works on paper. The theoretical part of the thesis aims to provide comprehensive overview of the international art trade. The objective of the case study is to analyze evolution of a narrowly defined art market segment in a given period and to compare it with the development of global art market and also with the presumptions resulting from the theoretical part. The other objective of the case study is to compare the return on investment of this art market segment with respect to the S&P 500 shares and gold.

This thesis investigates how competition effects in government procurement auction are affected by the risk distribution between the procurer and the winning bidder. The risk distribution is linked to the conditions of payment which is assumed to be largely determined by the procurer. Thus, by investigating whether competition effects are different dependent on the risk distribution, this thesis contributes to the previous literature which almost exclusively model competition effects to be determined exogenous sources of uncertainty and characteristics of the market. There is a previous literature on the effects of various payment conditions in auctions but it mostly considers ex post moral hazard issues, and not effects on the competitive behavior at the bidding stage. An econometric analysis is conducted on auctions of infrastructure construction contracts held by the Swedish Transport Administration between 2010 and 2013. The results suggest that the choice of risk distribution can shift an auction from having no competition effects in bidding to strong bid-reducing competition effects. Seemingly, the procurer appears to face a trade-off between avoiding risk and enjoying bid-reducing competition effects. The difference in competition effects between contracts with fixed and more flexible payment conditions is found to increase with the auctioned project’s expected duration. In terms of government procurement policy, the results suggest that it can be cost-efficient for the procuring entity to share the risk with the contractor in risky projects instead of avoiding risk with fixed price contracts. Whilst this may contradict some common notions regarding government procurement, it is in line with the wide use of flexible payment conditions in private-sector procurement. Arguably, the recent decade’s increased ambitions regarding innovation and sustainability in government procurement adds even further weight to these policy considerations for the risk management of procurers.

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