Vertical chains are industry structures where some firms (at the upstream level) supply other firms (at the downstream level). Imperfect competition usually prevails at both levels, and upstream and downstream firms also bargain with one another. The goal of this project is to understand the industrial organization of vertical chains in terms of competition and bargaining to analyze its consequence on the price, variety and quality of the products offered to consumers. To reach this goal, our project combines theoretical industrial organization research with empirical and experimental approaches. This project follows a previous Franco-German project that was financed by the ANR and the DFG over the period 2008-2011. This previous project was fruitful in many respects. First, we have shown important and original results in each of the tasks we had identified, and in most cases, these results have provided guidelines for competition authorities. Second, several Franco-German collaborations have emerged and besides, some have led to publications in top journals. The first project was, however, mostly theoretical. This new project will help us not only maintain and increase the existing interactions between participants in the field of theoretical industrial organization, but also develop new interactions between empirical and experimental economists who have joined on both the French and the German side. Finally, adding empirical and experimental analyses will allow us to focus on essential issues of vertical chains using three different and highly complementary methods. The overall project consists of four work packages. The goal of the first work package is to understand how competition and the balance of power between upstream and downstream firms affect the different types of investments realized by firms within a vertical chain. In particular, we focus on vertically related firms’ incentives to invest in quality or in operating cost reduction, in quality labeling and in corporate social responsibility. The second work package aims at integrating the diversity of retail formats in the analysis of both retail competition and the balance of power between retailers and their suppliers. Multi-format retail competition results from the heterogeneity of consumer’s shopping behavior and is likely to generate specific competition strategies (cross subsidization, loss-leading, etc.) as well as new bargaining strategies towards suppliers. The third work package focuses on anticompetitive effects of contracts, such as foreclosure effects or the vertical control of competition within vertical chains. The last work package takes a dynamic perspective to analyze issues of collusion and reputation building as well as firms’ strategies in the presence of demand uncertainties.

The Diet+ project proposes to analyse diets in France, by focusing on the relationships between the market mechanisms and the overall quality of diet, including the quality of the consumption, the possible improvements in the foods quality, the quality of the environment, the land use, and the possible improvements in public health. This project will particularly study the impact of diets changes on consumers, supply chains and farmers. These diets changes may come from both food innovations and/or policies aiming at improving both environment and public health. Applied microeconomics combined with food science/engineering will be used for analysing various markets adjustments and possible improvements in supply chains. Econometrics works, experimental economics, industrial analyses will lead to quantified estimates of various markets adjustments coming from these changes in diets. The objective of Diet+ is to provide precise estimates of impacts of diets changes on consumers, supply chains and farmers, by also considering both environment and public health. The project will be divided in three Work Packages (WP) taking into account various markets adjustments from the land use to the consumers’ health. The WP1 will focus on some changes in diets and their influences on markets and supply chains. The WP2 will detail the foods variety offered to consumers and the foods innovations with their impacts on market structures. Based on results of WP1 and WP2, the WP3 will examine the optimal policy that could improve the overall quality of diets. More precisely, the WP1 will focus on the overall change in diet, and its impact on both supply chains and characteristics related to environment and public health. We will focus on the meat sector that is often in front line regarding scientific and public debates. First, we will assess how a change in the demand for meat would impact overall consumers diet and agricultural production, by linking a demand model with an agricultural production model, assuming no food industry reactions. Second, we will study how this change in the demand for meat would influence consumers’ diet, firms’ profits and market shares of supply chains, by linking a demand model with a supply model for meat, assuming no agricultural producers’ responses. The WP2 will study recent consumption trends regarding food variety and innovation. The first task will focus on animal products with healthy and environmental-friendly characteristics, including the new-vegetal substitutes for meat. The second task will analyse the relationship between the market structure, the level of health and environmental-friendly varieties, and the innovations. We also plan to determine how the health and environmental-friendly characteristics affect the value sharing between producers, manufacturers and retailers. The third task is devoted to design one innovation in the cheese sector, by creating a mixed “animal-vegetal” cheese and by evaluating its consumers’ acceptance. The WP3 will analyse impacts of policies on diets, environment, public health, and their consequences on adjustments in supply chains. We will study the optimal choice of instruments such as per-unit taxes/subsidies, labels and/or standards/norms related to meat and dairy products. We will measure the impact of these policies on agents’ surpluses, environment and public health. Additionally, we will pay attention to the transition from the current agro-food sector to a new model aligned with nutrition and low-carbon objectives, which requires a precise study of “progressive” shifts at each stage of the supply chain. Eventually, WP3 will examine the complementarity between health and environment in the analysis of future policy choices. The combination of these different approaches will give a complete view regarding sustainable policies that directly or indirectly influences behaviours, market mechanisms and sustainability of diets.

Excessive intake of sugars and salt are linked to deleterious consequences on Human health. Current strategies to design and favor healthier options have limited effects due to their poor acceptability. SHIFT proposes a multidisciplinary approach, combining life-, social- and computer-sciences to understand the determinants, mechanisms, and levers to modulate the acceptability of a meal option. This project will address precise alimentary situations where margins of improvement with respect to salt and sugar reduction are possible, ie. acceptability of (i) water or low energy beverages in substitution of sodas and (ii) sweet- or salt-reduced options at the end of main meals. Interdisciplinary research activities will be conducted at the populational, contextual and individual scales to decipher criteria driving the acceptability foods. The project will be based on 4 research activities (4 workpackages) conducted jointly on precise alimentary situations. A first workpackage will conduct Artificial Intelligence research to derive the criteria that drive the acceptability of a food proposition. Non-supervised machine learning of food substitutability and causality inference techniques will be implemented on massive sets of dietary records. A second workpackage will examine the role of the micro-sociological context on the choice of healthier meal propositions. Studies will primarily consist in observing and analyzing food behavior in a University restaurant setting to reveal the contextual dynamics through which a food proposition can evolve to be more acceptable by individuals. A third workpackage will combine behavioural neurosciences and computational neurosciences approaches to decipher the individual decision-making processes that underlie the acceptance or rejection of a food proposition. Functional Magnetic resonance imaging techniques will allow the exploration of brain circuits involved when a proposition becomes acceptable or not acceptable while theoretical tools of value-based decision-making will model the mechanisms by which social modulations affect food decisions. Finally, on the basis of all research conducted in WP1, 2 and 3, a fourth workpackage will develop and test in ecological consumptions situations, a food substitution recommender engine, allowing us to generate individual, nutritionally relevant and acceptable food swaps. The impact of such a recommender engine will be assessed in real life conditions and a specific attention will be paid to reductions in sugar and salt intakes. The results and lessons from SHIFT on the design of efficient, personalized and context-aware dietary recommender advices will ground innovative behavior change policies to reduce sugars and salt intakes for populations. SHIFT gathers 5 academic partners: The laboratory of “Physiologie de la Nutrition et du Comportement Alimentaire” (INRA-AgroParisTech, project leader), the “Institut des Systèmes Intelligents et de Robotique” (Sorbonne Université, CNRS-INSERM), the laboratory of “Mathématiques et Informatique Appliquées” (INRA-AgroParisTech), the laboratory of “Alimentation et Sciences Sociales” (INRA) and the School of Psychology of the University of Birmingham and an industrial partner: Danone Nutricia Research (Global Nutrition Department).

The Time-Us project aims to reconstruct the remuneration and time budgets of women and men working in the textile trades in four French industrial regions (Lille, Paris, Lyon, Marseille) in an European and long-term perspective, by bringing together a multidisciplinary team of technology, economic and labour historians, natural language processing (NLP) experts and sociologists specializing in Le Play’s families’ budgets. The role of women in industrial development is now largely recognized in both sociological and economic studies on developing countries and the historiography of the first industrial revolution in Europe. Yet data on their remuneration, schedules and domestic work and that of men working in the same sectors remain deficient for many regions, especially for France. A full understanding of economic development cannot be achieved without assessing the quantity of women’s paid and unpaid work, and the male/female distribution of time spent on domestic work. The Time-Us project aims to collect missing data for France in a key sector of the first industrial revolution: textiles. The goal is to create comparable series on the remuneration and time allocation of employed men and women through, first, classical sources and company and trade association archives, and second, the piecing together of a series of qualitative sources identifying words and actions associated with work in both domestic and non-domestic activities. By proposing an exercise that has never been tackled for France to date, it aims to provide keys to understanding the gender gap by analyzing changes in work and time uses during the first industrialization process, and goes to the core of issues raised in the DEFI 8’s Axe 3. “Transformations in work and employment, organizational change” – and in the sub-areas “Family life/professional life balance and work time /social times” and “Women and men at work: the challenge of professional equality and the role of work”.

In this project, we will develop a behavioral economics module within the Constances epidemiological cohort in order to measure patient’s individual economic preferences toward risk, ambiguity and time. These psychological variables and the associated biases are the cornerstones of the normative and descriptive models of individual health decisions in health and behavioral economics. In WP1, we will administratively and logistically set up, implement and include an innovative behavioral economics module on individual preferences within the Constances cohort. We will conduct a web-based questionnaire to an online representative sub-sample of Constances volunteers in two waves at a one-year interval. Our aim is to collect a repeated measure of individual preferences of 5000 Constances volunteers. We will link this module to Constances survey data and medical records as well as relevant data from the French national security database (SNIRAM). We will hire specifically for this project a data manager and a data scientist (for respectively 24 and 18 months) who will prepare the dataset and preliminary statistics and will assist the scientific teams in charge of the four research projects presented hereafter. In WP2, we will investigate the evolution of individual preferences in a life course perspective and more precisely the causal and selection effects linking socioeconomic position to individual preferences (WP2.1) and the role of the patient’s health history in the evolution of individual preferences over time (WP2.2). In WP3, we will examine how individual preferences and socioeconomic indicators (SEP and economic insecurity) jointly determine individual choices of health-related behaviors in terms of primary prevention (e.g. over-eating, poor diets, lack of physical activity, smoking, alcohol abuse, drug use, sleep deprivation) and of secondary prevention (in particular for breast and cervical cancer screening) (WP 3.1) and of decisions related to pollution exposure and residential area (WP 3.2). The results of these studies will inform public policy makers on the decision making process involved in individual health-related behaviors and the social inequalities in health they can induce. Also, the unique dataset resulting from the BeHealth project will constitute a precious public good for national or international researchers in health economics, medicine, epidemiology and public health interested by the concepts developed in behavioral economics on individual preferences and deviations (or biases) from economic rationality.