Our society faces many risks that affect human life. Cost-benefit analysis is a very popular project-evaluation tool for reducing these social risks. The government has to set projects or regulations whose benefits will outweigh costs. It is quite easy to evaluate costs but how to evaluate the...

In this article, we present a problem of investment under uncertainty. When the managers make investment decisions they do not know the market (sales opportunities); however they know the price and the a priori distribution of sales. We compare the behavior of risk averse firms to that of risk...

The essays published in this collection reflect many issues of the actual research on the economics of uncertainty and information. Although they do not cover all the topics, they are related to the main developments since the first important meeting on the subject (Paris, 1952). Two aspects are...

The object of this paper is to analyse the effects of insurance and of the relation of trust between consumer and producer on the possibilities of fraud by the producer. Fraud is defined as the provision of unnecessary services to a consumer who does not possess full information about the...

In this paper, we present a survey of the two main problems of information in insurance markets: moral hazard and adverse selection. Both arise because the insurers are less informed than the insureds. Moral hazard is explained by the fact that the insurer cannot observe, ex ante, the activities...

In the first part of the article we present an update of Gagné and Dionne (1988) results. We show that trucking industries in Quebec and Ontario had a cost structure, during the period 1981-1988, that corresponds to a competitive industry; this justifies the recent deregulation moves. The...

In this paper, we present an economic analysis of road safety emphasizing market failures due to externalities and moral hazard. We also examine governmental actions such as taxes and subsidies and regulation which may reduce inefficiencies. Dans cet article nous présentons une analyse...

The purpose of this paper is to show that, for the risky situation caracterized by the probability p of losing an amount h, there exists an adequate measure of the risk variations caused by equivalent changes in p and h. This follows from an application of the concept of mean-preserving spread...

The goal of this research was to evaluate the effects of the 1992 change in the automobile insurance pricing by the Société de l'assurance automobile du Québec (SAAQ, the public insurer for bodily injuries) on road safety. Our results indicate that the new pricing system reduced infractions...