We compare three different elicitation methods for measuring risk attitudes of French farmers in a field experiment setting. We consider two experiments based on the lottery choices initially proposed by Holt and Laury (2002) and by Eckel and Grossman (2002,2008), a risk-taking psychological...

What is the best way to reward innovation? While prizes avoid deadweight loss, intellectual property selects high social surplus projects. Optimal innovation policy thus trades off the ex-ante screening benefit and the ex-post distortion. It solves a multidimensional screening problem in the...

The advent of "smart meters" will make possible Real Time Pricing of electricity: customers will face and react to wholesale spot prices, thus consumption of electric power will be aligned with its opportunity cost. This article determines the marginal value of a fraction of demand (or a...

The Boston mechanism is criticized for its poor incentive and welfare performance compared with the Gale-Shapley deferred-acceptance mechanism (DA). Using school choice data from Beijing, I investigate parents' behavior under the Boston mechanism, taking into account parents' possible mistakes...

We examine how different welfarist frameworks evaluate the social value of mortality riskreduction. These frameworks include classical, distributively unweighted cost-benefit analysis—i.e., the “value per statistical life” (VSL) approach—and three benchmark social welfare functions...

We show that every (random) assignment/allocation without transfers can be considered as a market outcome with personalized prices and an equal income. One can thus evaluate an assignment by investigating the prices and the induced opportunity sets. When prices are proportional across agents,...

This study elicits individual preferences for reducing morbidity and mortality risk in the context of an infectious disease (campylobacter) using choice experiments. Respondents are in the survey asked to choose between different policies that, in addition to the two health risks, also vary with...

We show that once interfamily exchanges are considered, Becker?s rotten kids mechan- ism has some remarkable implications that have gone hitherto unnoticed. Specifically, we establish that Cornes and Silva's (1999) result of e¢fficiency in the contribution game amongst siblings extends to a...

This article examines imperfectly competitive investment in electric power generation in the presence of congestion on the transmission grid. Under simple yet realistic assumptions, it precisely derives the technology mix as a function of the capacity of the transmission interconnection. In...

This article is the first to examine electric power producers' investment decisions when com- petition is imperfect and the transmission grid congested. This analysis yields numerous original insights. First, congestion on the grid is transient, and may disappear when demand is highest. Second,...