Résumé
As an answer to the recommendations of the European commission which preaches a better allocative effectiveness of agri-environmental measures in a restrictive budgetary context, the goal of the thesis is to assess the advantages of auction mechanisms to allocate agri-environmental contracts and their feasibility in a French context. Currently in Europe, agri-environmental subsidies are allocated by way of portfolios of measures which compensatory amount is calculated based on an assessment of the average compliance costs. However, this allocation procedure does not solve the issues raised by the asymmetric information between the public decision maker and the farmer. Other countries have implemented auctions to allocate agri-environmental contracts. Such procedures depend on the instauration of a competitive logic in the definition of the technical specification and of the premium associated to the contract. The first part of the thesis analyses the way agri-environmental payments are perceived by French farmers using a method derived from discrete choice models applied to a survey of farmers from the Lozère area. Auctions allow the policy maker to take into account the various objectives he seeks to attain simultaneously. Thus the definition of a scoring function to weigh various selection criteria of the farmers’ bids is an important challenge. The second part of this thesis uses a decision model to study the impact of the choice of these scoring functions on the environmental gain and the budget efficiency of the auction. The particular case of the Grass premium is analysed. The simultaneous implementation of multiple agri-environmental measures does not account for the potential cost synergies that the farmer benefits from. Basing on experimental results, the last part of this thesis analyses the relative performance of three types of auction in the presence of cost synergies.