The presentations address various issues such as:

- asymmetric information between the government or an environmental agency and the polluting industry or the supplier of an exhaustible resource ;
- the role played by the government both in setting a market for tradeable emissions permits and designing environmental taxation ;
- government’s commitment to reduce polluting emissions and provide firms with credible incentives to invest in R&D ;
- the regulation of polluting activities, risky activities and the encouragement of carbon offsets such a forestation ;
- the emergence of an eco-industry due to the growing concern for the environment ;
- the difficulty of international cooperation for the environment.

Topics to be covered include food and health (obesity, public policy, …), marketing in food retailing, market conduct and market power in the food processing industry, contractual relationships in theagro-food chain, cooperatives and contracts, product quality, information, and food safety, intellectual property rights and biotechnology, GMO, performance and productivity analysis of the agro-food sector.

It covers the state of the art in applied and empirical industrial organization.  Pinelopi Goldberg (Princeton University), Roman Inderst (University of Frankfurt and CEPR) and Jonathan Levin (Stanford University) have confirmed their participation as keynote speakers.

The conference is preceded by the Seventh CEPR School in Applied Industrial Organisation. The aim of the annual School is to provide a forum for intellectual exchanges between PhD students and more experienced researchers in the field of industrial organisation.

What is your recent research?
More recently, I have also had an interest in doing experiments on voting rules. Elections are the keystone of representative democracies. Yet, the details of the voting rules – whether one uses one round plurality, two round voting rules, proportional representation - might prove to be important in shaping the electoral outcomes. I have run experiments, both large scale and laboratory experiments, to study the impact of the voting rule on a number of parameters: number of viable candidates, likelihood that a consensual policy is chosen, incentives for voters to vote strategically, etc.

Those studies on voting rules may help shed some light on issues that were recently in the news. Many deplore the low turnout rates that were observed in many countries during the last European Parliament elections. Reforming the electoral system of the European Parliament, although unlikely to change the perception of those elections as 'second order' elections, could given citizens more electoral power, and help foster their interest in those elections. For example, introducing open ballots (preferential voting or alternative voting which are used in a majority of European countries, rather than the closed lists system as is the case now in France) could allow citizens to really choose the candidates that they will send to the Parliament, instead of giving most of the power to parties at the national level. This could induce candidates to campaign directly to citizens and enable citizens to reward incumbents for good performance in the European Parliament.

I am now part of a large international project supported by the Research Council of Canada, entitled “Making Electoral Democracy
Work”, which brings together political scientists, economists and psychologists from Canada, Europe and the US, to compare
electoral institutions across countries, using theoretical models, electoral surveys and experiments. Visit the project website:
http://electoraldemocracy.com/

Thomas Mariotti and his colleagues, Bruno Biais, Guillaume Plantin, Jean-Charles Rochet and Stéphane Villeneuve, have developed dynamic models describing the behavior of firm managers. According to them, it is optimal for a manager’s pay to be based on the long-term performance of the firm. For instance, bonuses should only be given in the case of positive results over a sufficiently long period. These bonuses should be suspended if the performance of the firm deteriorates. If necessary, the government should make sure that these rules are clear and simple.