Research Group in Theoretical and Applied Economics

All our thanks to Francesco Lissoni for his enthusiasm and helpful suggestions. We would also like to thank Eric Iversen for his comments. We gratefully acknowledge the French National Research Agency (ANR) for its support (reference: UTTO Project ANR-15-CE26-0005 & NPEIE Project ANR-17-CE26-0014-01), the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness (CSO2016-79045-C2- 1-R) and the Regional Government of Madrid (S2015/HUM-3491 PRODECON-CM). All errors remain ours.

Personalized and precision medicine (PPM)—the targeting of therapies according to an individual’s genetic, environmental, or lifestyle characteristics—is becoming an increasingly important approach in health care treatment and prevention. The advancement of PPM is a challenge in traditional clinical, reimbursement, and regulatory landscapes because it is costly to develop and introduces a wide range of scientific, clinical, ethical, and socioeconomic issues. PPM raises a multitude of economic issues, including how information on accurate diagnosis and treatment success will be disseminated and who will bear the cost; changes to physician training to incorporate genetics, probability and statistics, and economic considerations; questions about whether the benefits of PPM will be confined to developed countries or will diffuse to emerging economies with less developed health care systems; the effects of patient heterogeneity on cost-effectiveness analysis; and opportunities for PPM’s growth beyond treatment of acute illness, such as prevention and reversal of chronic conditions.This volume explores the intersection of the scientific, clinical, and economic factors affecting the development of PPM, including its effects on the drug pipeline, on reimbursement of PPM diagnostics and treatments, and on funding of the requisite underlying research; and it examines recent empirical applications of PPM.

Le secteur de la grande distribution a connu durant les deux dernieres decennies une profonde evolution qui a ete induite par les conversions de la sphere economique et sociale ; cette evolution est consideree comme etant une naturelle riposte des distributeurs face aux changements constates au niveau du comportement des consommateurs. Le present article propose un panorama des mutations les plus significatives dans le grand commerce en se focalisant sur trois aspects: La localisation du commerce qui s'articule avec les questions de la proximite et la variete dans les formats de vente; l’essor des marques de distributeurs (MDD) ainsi que les recentes mutations qui ont touche les competences des clients et leurs implications pour les enseignes de la grande distribution.

In this chapter, the author (Eric Rougier) first describes the dominant vision of institutions and development tending to disregard an institutional system’s complexity by reducing it to a limited set of very general one-dimensional institutions and then explains that institutions are best analysed as systems since they tend to cluster their effects on economic outcomes. The chapter proceeds by discussing how another strand of the institutional literature, dealing with the varieties of mature capitalisms, has opened the black box of institutional systems, suggesting the promising avenues for the comparative study of the developing countries’ specific forms of capitalism followed by the book. The author ultimately overviews existing typologies of developing countries’ economic systems and questions the extent to which they are effectively based on the examination of clusters of institutions.

In the final chapter, the editors (Eric Rougier and Francois Combarnous) provide their answers to the main questions raised in the book’s introduction. They then proceed to highlight two key aspects of the cross-country institutional discrepancies: the type of state intervention in socioeconomic governance and the role played by experimentation in shaping this type of socioeconomic governance. The policy implications of the book’s main results are then addressed, with special focus being put on institutional reforms in poor countries. Several policy-related proposals are then discussed, especially as regards institutional change and reforms in poor and middle-income countries: Should institutional reforms be coordinated or not? Are there successful “super-reformers” to be imitated by other countries? Is there still scope for individual experimentation? Finally, new horizons for research are suggested.

Les travaux récents associés à l’économie expérimentale et comportementale remettent en cause les hypothèses de l’analyse économique standard (rationalité pure, égoïsme des individus). À un objectif initial de réaménagement du paradigme dominant – permettant de rendre compte des comportements observés en laboratoire tout en préservant un cadre formel rationnel – se substitue une nécessaire refondation fondée sur des hypothèses de comportement plus réalistes. Après le détour walrasso-parétien, un retour à la conception de l’Économie politique soutenue par les auteurs classiques est donc envisageable. Dans cet article, nous montrons que la théorie philosophique du care , construite par opposition à la rationalité pure, fournit un guide à partir duquel les économistes peuvent construire une nouvelle économie du comportement sensible, personnelle et paternaliste. Nous montrons en particulier (1) comment les travaux récents en économie expérimentale et comportementale introduisent de façon novatrice les affects, la diversité de la représentation de l’individu et le rôle de l’intervention publique et (2) comment ces modifications appellent à une refonte du paradigme standard au-delà de ce que requiert la rationalité instrumentale.

Cet article propose une analyse critique des nombreuses contributions consacrées au « paradoxe Bairoch ». La publication en 2000 de l’article de O’Rourke a redynamisé les débats sur les liens entre politique commerciale et croissance économique entre 1870 et 1914. La question a été explorée à l’aide de techniques économétriques modernes et de nouvelles références théoriques en matière de croissance. Les résultats font apparaître une corrélation positive entre tarif et croissance pour les pays européens les plus avancés et les pays émergents de culture européenne. Deux pistes explicatives convergentes sont privilégiées : la qualité des institutions de ces pays et une capacité à bien choisir les secteurs protégés (porteurs de fortes externalités). Mais cette hypothèse de la pertinence sectorielle du protectionnisme peine à être validée par les analyses en termes de protection effective qui restent très fragmentées, n’étudient que quelques secteurs, que quelques points de repères chronologiques et n’intègrent pas l’existence à l’époque d’une dispersion tarifaire selon la provenance des produits.

This article questions the rather pessimistic conclusions of Allen and Carroll [Macroeconomic Dynamics5 (2001), 255–271] about the ability of consumers to learn the optimal buffer-stock-based consumption rule. To this end, we develop an agent-based model in which alternative learning schemes can be compared in terms of the consumption behavior that they yield. We show that neither purely adaptive learning nor social learning based on imitation can ensure satisfactory consumption behavior. In contrast, if the agents can form adaptive expectations, based on an evolving individualmental model, their behavior becomes much more interesting in terms of its regularity and its ability to improve performance (which is a clear manifestation of learning). Our results indicate that assumptions on bounded rationality and on adaptive expectations are perfectly compatible with sound and realistic economic behavior, which, in some cases, can even converge to the optimal solution. This framework may therefore be used to develop macroeconomic models with adaptive dynamics.