Why are there areas with persistenly low levels of income or consumption? This could result from the concentration of households with a low capital endowment or from variations in households’ environment. Peru is a country with a very much fragmented topography and climate, that combines dry...

Fiscal constraints and policy changes to improve effectiveness of programs in reducing poverty has progressively led the international community to use tools for reaching the poor. Targeting antipoverty interventions is one of them. This paper aims at providing a general review of experiences of...

In this thesis we explore some uses of optimal control and mass transport in economic modeling. We thus catch the opportunity to bring together some works involving both tools, sometimes mixing them. First, we briefly present the recent mean field games theory introduced by Lasry & Lions and...

A firm chooses a price and the product information it discloses to a consumer whose tastes are privately known. We provide a necessary and sufficient condition on the match function for full disclosure to be the unique equilibrium outcome whatever the costs and prior beliefs about product and...

Improved consumer information about horizontal aspects of products of similar quality leads to better consumer matching but also to higher prices, so consumer surplus can go up or down, while profits rise. With enough quality asymmetry, though, the higher-quality (and hence larger) firm's price...

This note analyzes some properties of optional two-part pricing in a two-type economy. First, the optimal contracts along the Paretian frontier are described. Then, the duality relation between the Rawlsian program and the discriminating monopoly is demonstrated. Last, this property is used to...

We study competition in two sided markets with common network externality rather than with the standard inter-group effects. This type of externality occurs when both groups benefit, possibly with different intensities, from an increase in the size of one group and from a decrease in the size of...