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International audience; In many cases, consumers cannot observe a single firm’s investment in environmental quality or safety, but only the average quality of the industry. The outcome of the investment is stochastic, since firms cannot control perfectly the technology or external factors that may affect production. In addition, firms do not know consumers’ valuation of quality. We characterize the solution of the firms’ investment game and show that the value of stopping investments when firms are already investing in quality can be negative when the free-riding incentives dominate. The existence of systematic uncertainty on the outcome of investment slows down investment in quality, compared to a situation without uncertainty. The uncertainty on consumers’ willingness to pay for quality can speed up or slow down investment. We also obtain the counterintuitive result that information acquisition may decrease the overall level of quality.

International audience; In this paper, we evaluate the impact of the introduction of electricity produced by Nuclear Power (NP) plants on the electricity price formed in a liberalized, power-exchange based market. In order to do so, we build a realistic large-scale agent-based model that replicates the features of a real market (the Italian one). Firstly, we validate the computational model using exact historical data about supply, demand and network characteristics. A statistical analysis confirms that the simulator well replicates the observed prices. Then, a future scenario is simulated, based on plausible market evolutions and energy carriers' price dynamics. The future electricity prices are evaluated with and without NP plants. Different NP plants' ownerships are considered to take into account how agents' competition is affected by the introduction of such a large base-load generator. It is shown that NP reduces the prices and volatility, but the size (and the sign) of the impact depends on the pattern of the expected demand load and the ownership structure of the NP plants.

International audience; This paper considers a decision-making process under ambiguity in which the decision-maker is supposed to split outcomes between familiar and unfamiliar ones. She is assumed to behave differently with respect to unfamiliar gains, unfamiliar losses and customary (familiar) outcomes. In particular, she is supposed to be pessimistic on gains, optimistic on losses and ambiguity neutral on the familiar outcomes. A generalization of the usual Choquet Integral is formalized when the decision maker holds capacities and probabilities. A characterization of the decision-maker's behavior is provided for a specific subset of capacities, in which it is shown that the decision-maker underestimates the unfamiliar outcomes while is linear in probabilities on customary ones.