Search

International audience; In their persistent fight against regulation, firms have developed specic strategies to take advantage of scientific uncertainty. They have spent large amounts of money to manufacture doubt and artificially keep controversies alive. We develop a new model to study the interplay between scientific uncertainty, fifirms' communication and public policies. The government is benevolent but populist and maximizes social welfare as perceived bycitizens. The industry can provide costly evidence that its activity is not harmful. Citizens incorrectly treat the industry's information on par with scientific knowledge. We characterize the industry's optimal communication policy. We find that communication effort is non-monotonous and discontinuous in scientific belief. As scientists become increasingly convinced that the industrial activity is harmful, firms first fight harder and harder to reassure people. When scientists' beliefs reach a critical threshold, however, overcoming the scientific consensus becomes too costly and the industry stops its e¤orts abruptly. We then study the impacts of firms' communication on scientific funding. Perversely, a populist government may want to support research to better allow firms to miscommunicate. Populist policies can entail significant welfare losses. Establishing an independent funding agency always reduces these losses and may lead to under- or over- investment in research with respect to the first-best.

La responsabilité du secteur agricole français en matière d’émissions de gaz à effet de serre (GES) n’est plus à prouver. Face à ce constat, des mesures d’atténuation sont proposées aux agriculteurs français. Or, une étude récente montre que ceux-ci auraient intérêt économiquement à mettre en place ces mesures, mais qu’ils ne le font pas. Partant de là, les auteurs se demandent si l’aversion au risque et l’aversion à l’ambiguïté des agriculteurs pourraient apporter un nouvel éclairage sur les freins à l’adoption des mesures d’abattement. Pour cela, ils présentent et utilisent les théories économiques du risque et de l’ambiguïté existantes, ainsi que la littérature empirique s’attachant à caractériser les préférences individuelles face au risque et à l’ambiguïté., The responsibility of the French agricultural sector for greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) is no longer to be proven. Faced with this, mitigation measures are proposed to French farmers. However, a recent study shows that it would be economically advantageous for these measures to be put in place, but they do not. On this basis, we question whether risk aversion and aversion to ambiguity of farmers could shed new light on the obstacles to the adoption of abatement measures. To do so, we present and use the existing economic theories of risk and ambiguity, as well as the empirical literature that attempts to characterize individual preferences in the face of risk and ambiguity.