There is a recent emergence of open government initiatives for citizen participation in policy making in China. Open government initiatives seek to increase the level of participation, deliberation and transparency in government affairs, sometimes by use of Internet fora. In contemporary political science the introduction of these initiatives in authoritarian contexts has been described as a paradox of authoritarian deliberation. This thesis uses cybernetic theory, perspectives of information steering in all systems, to resolve the paradox and present a new view on authoritarianism and autocracy. A cybernetic definition of autocracy allows for an analysis of different types of autocracy in different models of governance. The theoretical tools developed are used to define and assess the potential for democratic autocracy, representative autocracy, deliberative autocracy and collaborative autocracy in online open government initiatives in China.   The argument of the thesis is that these initiatives must be understood within the environment in which they are introduced. In the case of the Chinese online environment, individuals often have limited possibilities of acting anonymously. To explore how online identity registration affects citizens, a lab-in-the-field experiment was set up. Chinese university students were invited to engage with a government sponsored online forum under conditions of both anonymity and identity registration. Previous research suggests that anonymity would lead users of online fora to be more active and produce more content. This hypothesis was partly proven false by the experiment. This study shows that users who have their identities registered, sometimes even produce more content. The study also shows that registered users tend to act against their own preferences and participate more in nationalistic debates. The concluding discussion is focused on the wider implications of these effects. If citizens are incentivized to channel their dissatisfaction as loyalty, rather than voice or exit, they might become complicit in sustaining authoritarianism. Interviews with experiment participants show that open government initiatives primarily enable deliberative and collaborative autocracy when introduced in the Chinese online environment. This has the potential of increasing the amount of dissatisfaction that citizens channel as loyalty via mechanisms of authoritarian collaboration.

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Cette thèse porte sur la façon dont les individus prennent des décisions en présence de risque et d'incertitude. Elle est composée de quatre essais qui étudient théoriquement et expérimentalement la prise de décision.Les deux premiers essais étudient des situations où un décideur doit décider si un événement a eu lieu en utilisant des informations incertaines. Le fait d'identifier correctement que cet événement s'est produit est plus rémunéré que le fait d'identifier correctement qu'il ne s'est pas produit. Ce problème de décision induit une divergence entre deux qualités d'une décision : l'optimalité et l'exactitude. Les deux essais reproduisent de telles situations dans une expérience de laboratoire basée sur des tâches perceptuelles et analysent les décisions en utilisant la théorie de la détection du signal pour étudier l'arbitrage optimalité-exactitude. Le premier essai confirme l'existence d'un tel arbitrage avec un rôle dominant de la recherche de l'exactitude. Il explique l'existence de cet arbitrage par utilité non-monétaire associée au fait d'avoir raison. Le deuxième chapitre montre que présenter les informations perceptuelles en dernier contribue à l'existence de l'arbitrage optimalité-exactitude.Le troisième essai étudie comment les préférences vie-à-vie d'autrui interagissent avec l'attitude face à l'ambiguïté. Il présente les résultats d'une expérience où les sujets doivent faire des dons à des associations caritatives. Les dons peuvent avoir des coûts ou des bénéfices ambigus. Nous constatons que l'ambiguïté a pour effet de rendre les individus plus égoïstes. En d'autres termes, nous montrons que les individus utilisent l'ambiguïté comme une excuse pour ne pas donner. Ce comportement d’auto-justification est plus marqué pour les coûts ambigus que pour les avantages ambigus.Le quatrième essai examine la validité externe des mesures de préférence pour le risque en laboratoire en utilisant des décisions dans d'autres tâches expérimentales risquées et des décisions prisent sur en dehors du laboratoire. Nous constatons que les mesures de préférence pour le risque permettent d'expliquer les premières, mais qu'elles n'expliquent pas les secondes. / This thesis investigates how individuals make decisions under risk and uncertainty. It is composed of four essays that theoretically and experimentally investigate decision-making.The first two essays study situations where a decision maker has to decide whether an event has occurred using uncertain evidence. Accurately identifying that this event has occurred is more rewarded than accurately identifying that it has not occurred. This decision problem induces a divergence between two qualities of a decision: optimality and accuracy. Both essays reproduce such situations in a laboratory experiment based on perceptual tasks and analyze behavior using Signal Detection Theory to study the optimality-accuracy trade-off. The first essay confirms the existence of the trade-off with a leading role of accuracy. It explains the trade-off by the concern of individuals for being right. The second chapter finds that presenting perceptual evidence last contributes to the existence of the optimality-accuracy trade-off.The third essay studies how other-regarding preferences interact with attitude toward ambiguity. It reports the results of an experiment where subjects have to make donations to charities. Donations may have either ambiguous costs or ambiguous benefits. We find that other-regarding preferences are decreased under ambiguity. In other terms, we highlight that individual use ambiguity has an excuse not to give. This excuse-driven behavior is stronger for ambiguous costs than ambiguous benefits.The fourth essay challenges the external validity of laboratory risk preference measures using behavior in experimental risk tasks and naturally occurring behavior under risk. We find that risk preference measures are related with the former but that they fail to explain the latter.

Modern agriculture is causing a wide range of environmental problems. By regulating the agricultural sector, human societies try to find a balance between enabling the production of food and public goods and preventing negative consequences for the environment. In the European Union this is mainly achieved through the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). Since many of the environmental indicators are still showing negative trends, an ongoing evaluation and adaptation of the policy instruments included in the CAP is asked for. At the same time, the field of policy evaluation is more and more incorporating a behavioral economic perspective on human behavior, one that deviates from the homo oeconomicus model that has long dominated research in this area. This thesis presents a study on “Behavioral Economics of Agri-Environmental Policies” by combining themes from agricultural and environmental economics with methods and perspectives from behavioral and experimental economics. It thereby contributes to the emerging field of behavioral agricultural economics. Specifically, it aims to shed light on the behavioral drivers of pro-environmental decisions of farmers and how these insights can be used to evaluate and adapt the CAP. With a lab-in-the-field experiment with farmers from Lower Saxony in Germany, an influence of the framing of the farmers’ societal role, their self-identity, as well as control aversion and feelings of warm glow on farmers’ behavior was uncovered. From a policy perspective, the results of this thesis provide a case for the continued use of both mandatory and voluntary policy instruments. Furthermore, with a Principal Components and Cluster Analysis, a multi-facetted picture of different farmer self-identities prevalent in the sample population was revealed. Based on a literature review, the thesis also provides an analysis of how behaviorally-informed interventions might increase the environmental performance of the CAP in the future.