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International audience; This paper uses a DEA bad-output framework to assess the efficiency of court settlement activities and examine how efficiency depends on both the characteristics of the conciliators and on institutional factors. The empirical analysis relies on court level data of conciliation activities in French civil magistrate courts between 2010 and 2017. Results show that efficiency is positively related to factors that foster the demand for settlement. More efficient courts are more prone to involving conciliation in the judicial circuit. Finally, the professional background and previous experience of conciliators are positively related to efficiency.

International audience; Ce Précis propose un panorama des méthodes expérimentales utilisées en sciences économiques. Ces méthodes ont été développées afin d’observer les comportements adoptés par les « agents économiques » dans des situations qui répliquent celles auxquelles s’intéresse l’économiste ; mais dans un environnement contrôlé. Sur cette base, les outils présentés dans ce précis permettent de tester les prédictions et le contenu empirique de la théorie économique, de faire émerger de nouveaux faits stylisés sur le fonctionnement de situations mal comprises par la théorie, ou encore d’informer l’élaboration des politiques publiques. Cette large palette d’objectifs explique que ces méthodes soient devenues très courantes en économie appliquée, et que leur usage se soit diffusé au-delà de l’économie à des domaines tels que le marketing, la gestion ou encore le management.L’ouvrage présente un traitement détaillé des principaux outils disponibles pour mesurer différents aspects des comportements économiques : les décisions individuelles dans le certain et dans l’incertain, les choix intertemporels, les interactions stratégiques, les préférences sociales et les mécanismes d’allocation de ressources. L’ouvrage présente également les critères méthodologiques qui permettent d’évaluer la pertinence théorique et empirique des données récoltées à partir de ces outils.

International audience; In this paper we study the role of social context, as characterized by different informal norm-enforcement mechanisms, on the deterrence legacy of temporary external regulations. In a public goods game, we create conditions in which a prosocial norm of cooperation is enforced via either anonymous peer punishment or face-saving concerns. In two test treatments, we introduce to these social environments an external regulation that is implemented for a limited period of time and then removed. We observe a significant negative post-intervention effect of this removal in the context of peer disapproval, but no such effect in the context of face-saving concerns. Our findings reveal the importance of the type of norm-enforcement mechanism in determining the robustness of norm adherence in the long term.

The empathy-altruism hypothesis postulates that the awareness of others’ need, pain, or distress increases empathetic feelings, which in turn triggers cooperative behaviour. Although some evidence supports this hypothesis, previous studies were prone to the ‘experimenter demand effects’ raising concerns about the interpretation of the results. To avoid this issue, we designed a laboratory experiment where we examined whether the presence of individuals with a genuine physical disability would increase group cooperation in a public goods game. By manipulating the group composition during a social dilemma, we created a more ecologically valid environment closer to real-life interactions. Our results showed that the presence of physically disabled individuals did not affect group cooperation. Specifically, their presence did not affect the contributions of their physically abled partners. The lack of a surge in cooperative behaviour questions the interpretation of previous studies and suggests that they may be explained by an experimenter demand effect. Alternatively, our results may also suggest that in the context of a social dilemma with real stakes, people with physical disabilities are not perceived as being in need or do not induce enough empathy to overweight the cost of cooperation and trigger cooperative behaviours.

International audience

At a time when legislative powers are being undermined by strengthened executives, oversight has become a core function of parliaments throughout the democratic world. In the European Parliament (ep), whose legislative role has been enhanced throughout the integration process, a significant proportion of the activities of its members is devoted to their broad ‘functions of political control’ on the EU’s executive institutions (art. 14 teu). The ways in which Members of the European Parliament (meps) exercise these functions and how the EU political system is impacted in turn remains, however, an under-researched topic. Focusing specifically on parliamentary questions, this article investigates the day-to-day interactions between the ep and one major EU institution, namely the European Central Bank (ecb). It seeks to establish what motivates meps questions concerning monetary and financial policies. Relying on a new dataset, we find evidence that meps’ questions to the ecb are subject to both strategic and partisan considerations.

International audience; An important part of the debate about self vs state-governance involves a discussion about enforcement mechanisms. While some scholars argue that private enforcement mechanisms work sufficiently well in supporting cooperation, others cite the downfalls of private mechanisms so as to legitimize government enforcement. This paper focuses on the interplay between government and private enforcement mechanisms. Using an experimental approach, we demonstrate two results. First, we show that government enforcement, in the form of a centralized monetary punishment in our experiment, can be useful if aligned with and implemented after a private form of enforcement, namely peer disapproval. However, our second result suggests that the removal of government enforcement leads to a substantial decrease in overall cooperation levels – cooperation levels are higher under private enforcement when subjects had never experienced government enforcement compared to when they had been exposed to government enforcement. Specifically, the removal of government enforcement undermines the power of the remaining private enforcement mechanism to affect the behavior of free-riders.

International audience; The French National Front/Rally (FN/RN) is often presented as an epitome of far-right parties in Europe. As early as the 1980s, this party started to deploy a strategy of de-demonization to broaden its electoral basis and forge alliances with the traditional right. In light of this strategy, the aim of this chapter is to assess whether – and to what extent – this party still represents a threat to democracy and, more precisely, to democratic pluralism. We examine the ideas, proposals, and reforms advocated by the FN/RN that appear to be against the principles and values of pluralism. A common view of the FN/RN over the last two decades is that of a shift initiated by Marine Le Pen when taking over the party in 2011. We thus develop and bring to a test a series of hypotheses based on the idea of leadership changes affecting party identity and organization. We assess the depth of the ideological shift by analyzing and comparing the manifestos of Jean-Marie and Marine Le Pen over the last four presidential contests.

Figurative drawing is a skill that takes time to learn, and it evolves during different childhood phases that begin with scribbling and end with representational drawing. Between these phases, it is difficult to assess when and how children demonstrate intentions and representativeness in their drawings. The marks produced are increasingly goal-oriented and efficient as the child's skills progress from scribbles to figurative drawings. Pre-figurative activities provide an opportunity to focus on drawing processes. We applied fourteen metrics to two different datasets (N = 65 and N = 344) to better understand the intentional and representational processes behind drawing, and combined these metrics using principal component analysis (PCA) in different biologically significant dimensions. Three dimensions were identified: efficiency based on spatial metrics, diversity with color metrics, and temporal sequentiality. The metrics at play in each dimension are similar for both datasets, and PCA explains 77% of the variance in both datasets. Gender had no effect, but age influenced all three dimensions differently. These analyses for instance differentiate scribbles by children from those drawn by adults. The three dimensions highlighted by this study provide a better understanding of the emergence of intentions and representativeness in drawings. We discussed the perspectives of such findings in comparative psychology and evolutionary anthropology.

International audience; Introduction: Among risky driving behaviours, speeding is a main causal and aggravating factor of road crashes and is more frequent among men than women. Research suggests that this gender gap could be explained by gender social norms which lead men to assign more social value to speeding than women. However, few studies had proposed to directly investigate gendered prescriptive norms associated with speeding. We proposed to address this gap through two studies based on the socio-cognitive approach to social norms of judgment.Methods. Study 1 (N = 128, within-subject design) investigated the extent to which speeding is subject to social valuation among men, compared to women, through a self-presentation task. Study 2 (N = 885, between-subject design) aimed to identify the dimension of social value (i.e., social desirability, social utility) that both genders associated with speeding, based on a judgment task.Results and conclusion: Although results of study 1 indicate that both genders devaluate speeding and valuate speed limits compliance, we found that men do so to a lesser extent than women. Results of study 2 further suggest that men less valuate speed limit compliance than women on the social desirability dimension, while no gender difference were found in valuation of speeding on both dimensions of social value. Regardless of gender, results also indicate that speeding is valued more on the social utility than on the social desirability dimension, while speed limit compliance is valued similarly on both dimensions.Practical applications: Road safety campaigns toward men could benefit to focus more on enhancing the representations of speed compliant drivers, in terms of social desirability, than devaluing the representation of speeding drivers.

This report presents RECONNECT’s final policy recommendations and proposals for amendments to the European Union’s (EU or Union) founding Treaties, as well as to the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (Charter). The suggested changes aim to strengthen democracy and rule of law in the EU, recognizing the Union’s potential to use its fundamental values to reconnect with citizens and, thus, bolster transparency and legitimacy for the European project. The report is to be read in conjunction with RECONNECT’s new narrative for European integration, which also highlights the importance of fundamental values, such as democracy and the rule of law, in the everyday life of European citizens.

International audience; The withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union (EU) does not only challenge the idea of an ever-deeper integrated union; it also calls into question the very principles on which the European political order has been established. Against this backdrop, the contributions of this Special Issue set out to analyse how parliaments, that is political institutions at the core of democratic systems, have positioned themselves towards and reacted to Brexit. In this introductory article, I first discuss the meaning of Brexit as yet another major political crisis with serious consequences potentially affecting the role and functioning of representative institutions and actors across the EU. Having taken stock of the extant literature on the parliamentarisation and politicisation of the EU, I then detail the cross cutting issues that permeate this Special Issue, namely: How do parliamentarians assess the UK’s decision to withdraw from the EU and its consequences? Does Brexit exacerbate existing political divisions or does it generate new cleavages? To what extent have parliaments attempted to and succeeded in influencing Brexit negotiations and their outcome? Finally, the rest of the introductory article provides an overview of the articles constituting this Special Issue.

International audience; National parliaments have been increasingly involved in EU affairs including in the reforms of EU institutions which, in most countries, they must ratify. How national parliamentarians (MPs) view and react to the challenge of Brexit is therefore of the uppermost significance for the future of European integration. The objective of this article is to analyse whether national MPs (outside the UK) see Brexit as a threat or an opportunity for the EU. It hypothesises that MPs’ evaluation of Brexit depends on three sets of factors: their ideology, their general attitude toward European integration and their country’s exposure to the consequences of Brexit. The empirical analysis relies on a survey of national MPs from nine EU countries conducted in 2017–2018. It shows that their perceptions of Brexit are part of a broader set of attitudes toward European integration and that there is a cleavage between pessimist and optimist MPs.

Recently discovered, the oldest human abstract drawing is around 73,000 years. Although the origins of drawing behaviour have remained an enigma to this day, light may be shone on the subject through its study among our closest neighbours, the great apes. This study analyses 749 drawings of five female Bornean orang-utans (Pongo pygmaeus) at Tama Zoological Park in Japan. We searched for differences between individuals but also tried to identify possible temporal changes among the drawings of one individual, Molly, who drew almost 1,300 drawings from 2006 to 2016. A classical analysis of the drawings was carried out after collecting quantitative and qualitative variables. Our findings reveal evidence of differences in the drawing style of the five individuals as well as creative changes in Molly's drawing style throughout her lifetime. Individuals differed in terms of the colours used, the space they filled but also the shapes (fan patterns, circles or loops) they drew. Molly drew less and less as she grew older, and we found a significant difference between drawings produced in winter, when orang-utans were kept inside and had less activity, and those produced during other seasons. Our results suggest that the drawing behaviour of these five orangutans is not random and that differences among individuals might reflect differences of styles, states of mind but also motivation to draw. These novel results are a significant contribution to our understanding of how drawing behaviour evolved in hominids.

PurposeThis article investigates the distinctive characteristics and the performance of academic spin-offs within young innovative companies (YICs) supported by public regional agencies. Considering that academic spin-offs are characterized by high intensity in innovation and technology transfer, we raise the issue of their performance relative to other YICs.Design/methodology/approachThe authors focus on YICs which receive support from public or semi-public institutions at the early stage of their development as a reward for their innovative business ideas. The study is performed in two steps. First, the authors estimate the growth of the academic spin-offs within a set of YICs supported for fewer than 5 years. This estimation is based on data gathered in 2014. Second, the authors investigate the survival of these supported YICs with the Cox proportional hazards model, 5 years later, at the end of 2019.FindingsResults reveal that academic spin-offs are more able to capture resources in the early stages: These firms have more patents, more external funding and higher increases in the number of employees. The authors also demonstrate that academic spin-offs have the highest survival rates.Research limitations/implicationsThe drawback of the studies on ASOs is the limited sample. The main issue is related to survival analysis. Limitation of the sample sizes precludes from in-depth survival analyses, which may highlight fundamental differences in the development patterns of the firm.Practical implicationsThe study’s results provide evidence on how the identity of academic spin-offs based on technology transfer act as a positive signal to obtain legitimacy. It is of particular interest for entrepreneurs who can rely on trust provided by their parent institution to engage in negotiations with different stakeholders. Moreover, results give insights to policymakers on the usefulness to invest on academic spin-offs because of its outperforming results.Originality/valueThe results provide important insights for designing, conducting and monitoring policies that favor innovation. Moreover, it demonstrates to universities, research institutions and entrepreneurs engaged in technology transfer the economic and social usefulness of their approach.

International audience

International audience; Each year about 60 million people flee their home country and seek to cross into developed countries, thus urging the latter to develop different policy responses to face the growing concerns about how immigration may affect social order. We design a novel two-part public goods experiment with radical income asymmetry between groups to investigate how voting on (not) helping less-endowed others affects pro-social behavior in the voting groups. We find that no group ever votes to help less-endowed ones. This, in turn, results in a breakdown of prosociality within the voting groups. We study the reasons why the implementation of voting—compared to no voting or to imposed solidarity—results in a significant, negative impact on cooperation levels within the voting groups.

This paper focuses on unveiling the underlying conceptions required to elaborate a concept such as indirect legislation, and on possible methods of distinguishing it from direct legislation. Three ...

International audience

In this paper, we analyse the controversy that took place between Blum and Kalven, and Calabresi around rationality or, more broadly, how individuals behave. We analyse how their respective conception regarding this specific aspect was included in their analyses about what economics could say about fault, liability and compensation of victims in the case of accident and their respective views on the law. First, we show that the debate was a sequel of the discussions that took place in tort law from the 1930s to the 1950s. Second, we claim that their treatment of rationality strongly relates to their views about what the law should be and about what are the objectives and goals of the law.