Visual confidence refers to our ability to estimate the correctness of our visual perceptual decisions. As compared to other forms of metacognition, meta-perception has attracted a burst of studies recently, no doubt because perception already benefits from strong theoretical frameworks. We have recently refined these existing frameworks by proposing to clearly distinguish sensory evidence from some “confidence evidence” that drives the confidence decision. The problem now is to characterize the properties and consequences of this confidence evidence, and this is the aim of the present proposal. As the number of studies grows, it becomes clear that visual confidence is not simply a noisy estimate of the perceptual decision, but instead depends on a large number of factors. We have identified four axes that we believe will contribute to shape confidence evidence: (1) individual variability, (2) task accessibility, (3) global confidence, and (4) perceptual learning. The purpose of the first axis is to understand which cues are used for confidence, and for this purpose, we will study confidence variability across individuals. Some of the idiosyncratic variability in confidence judgment efficiency might come from a variable temptation to exaggerate the impact of stimulus noise on the estimation of one own performance. In the second axis, we will try to understand what in a task determines the accessibility to visual confidence. In particular, we will test the hypothesis that more high-level tasks, such as face identification, lead to better confidence efficiency that low-level tasks, such as detecting whether two line segments are aligned. The aim of the third axis is to understand how individuals construct a sense of confidence for a task as a whole, not for a single isolated judgment. We will start by carefully studying how confidence builds up within a set of stimuli and compare how such a global confidence compares with a single decision confidence. Finally, in the fourth axis, we will study how perceptual learning benefits from visual confidence. In particular, we will test the extent to which confidence evidence can be seen as an internal error signal that can act as a proxy for an external feedback. We believe that a better understanding of these four fundamental aspects of confidence evidence will help us derive an accurate and useful model of visual confidence, and ultimately of metacognition.

I am a Full Professor in Economics at the University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. I graduated in 2009 with a Ph.D in Economics from the University of Minnesota under the supervision of Aldo Rustichini. I am an applied game theorist intrigued by the study of behavior that deviates from perfect rationality. I thus employ laboratory and field experiments to collect data, which I analyze to better understand (and model) economic decision-making. Over the years, my research interests have spanned from an analysis and modelling of behavior in repeated games to that in prediction markets. My papers have been published in prestigious journals such as International Economic Review, Games and Economic Behavior, and Frontiers in Neuroscience to name a few. My recent working paper titled ‘Information Aggregation Under Ambiguity: Theory and Experimental Evidence’ with Galanis and Kotronis inspired this research proposal. The paper is revised to be resubmitted to The Review of Economic Studies.

ECOVID-19 aims to provide a comparative cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) of public policies undertaken in real-life conditions during the Covid-19 epidemic in France. We will compare three main measures: i) confinement measures ii) testing with a specific focus on undocumented infections iii) reminders on the so-called “barrier gestures”. To do so we will build a theoretical model of disease diffusion and test the model using quasi-experimental variation during the outbreak to evaluate the respective importance of policies and the timing of their implementation. Our approach will be complementary to epidemiological models and other SHS projects previously selected by REACTing. Including individual trade-offs, learning, and externalities under uncertainty is indeed the main added value of economics in this field of research. Our theoretical model will start from Adhvaryu (Review of economic studies, 2014) and Li et al. (Science, 2020) and will aim at quantifying the role of undocumented infections in France during the outbreak. Our focus will be on individual behaviors under belief-based uncertainty and the learning adaptive process during the outbreak. Our empirical test will be based on Adda (Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2016) to estimate the relative cost-effectiveness of the above mentioned measures, while taking uncertainty and learning into account. Data on infections will come from two cohorts of patients: the "cohort of infected patients" (since the first patient treated on 01/24 in Bichat) and the "contact case cohort" managed by Santé Publique France and REACTing. This data will be combined with school closure, transports limitation, public announcements dates on compulsory confinement, and Twitter volume peaks as a proxy for information campaigns. We will use a simple event-study approach combined with a fuzzy difference-in-difference to assess the effectiveness of such measures. To calculate the expected monetary benefits, cost estimates will be taken from the literature and data we will collect. Our project answers concretely to the third priority of the proposal namely “Infection prevention and control measures in community settings” and to two sub-objectives: “Conditions of efficiency and real conditions for implementing information, prevention, care and control actions” and “Evaluation and modelling of prevention and control measures”. This project brings together researchers who are among the best experts on the economics of health epidemics and human behaviors. The proposed team is limited to three researchers, one research assistant and one post-doctoral student to work efficiently and provide fast answers to relevant public policy questions in order to prepare future epidemics. Four external experts from different fields have been added in the governance of the project to receive feedbacks on our results. Keywords: Economic activity, Economic Epidemiology, Cost-Effectiveness

The first generations of baby-boomers reached their sixties on the eve of the 21st century. The number of retirements increased over the last decade and will remain high until 2035, which means more retirees in the future. The current generations of retirees are quite different from previous generations. The couples are less often married. The increase in divorce rate and marital separations also means that retirees will be more likely to have experienced a marital separation, several marriages or partnerships and formed a stepfamily. Their professional experiences also differ, with the arrival of a generation of women who worked significantly more and partner who were more likely to spend more time unemployed. Although research on the impact of careers on various dimensions of old age is plentiful, the impact of the changes in marital behavior has been much less studied. Older couples have received some attention in sociology, in particular by Vincent Caradec (1994,1996), and in demography (Murphy et al. 2007, Tomassini et al 2004, Delbès Gaymu 2003, 2004). Yet, they have received relatively little attention in the economic literature despite these changes. Close to retirement age, the vast majority of people are in couples, comprising 75% of women and 85% of men among those aged 55 to 65 (Toulemon 2007). Inequalities among partners in terms of revenue or sharing household tasks, already present during the working life, can be accentuated or dampened at these ages. The risks of widowhood and dependence (Bonnet et. al. 2011) can become so strong that couples anticipate them by moving, adapting their homes or reducing their consumption. These elder couples thus make choices for which the determinants can be different that for younger couples. This project therefore proposes to study couples over 50, soon-to-be or already retired, along several dimensions. Retirement is a key moment in the life cycle and does not necessarily occur simultaneously for both spouses. A first theme describes the evolution in around retirement and at older ages: new types of unions, separations and family decomposition safer age 50. The description of the marital environment is essential for making demographic projections and for estimating the needs for dependence-related policies. Indeed, the presence of a spouse can delay the need for public assistance, as the spouse is often the primary caregiver. Retirement is also a time when traditional roles regarding the allocation of household tasks can be renegotiated, when one spouse retires before the other, or when one becomes dependent. A second theme deals with this time allocation decision for elderly couples. The end of the working life also brings financial consequences in terms of income and assets, which is the subject of a third theme. Finally, we investigate the economic consequences of marital dissolution in old age resulting from separation or the death of a spouse. The consequences of aging are numerous and cannot be adequately addressed by a single discipline or a single domain of expertise. If the approach adopted in this project is primarily economic, it also benefits from indispensable insights from sociology and demography. We have formed an interdisciplinary team of 14 researchers from six institutions: EHESS, the CES (University of Paris 1), CREST, CRESPPA, University of Cergy-Pontoise and INED. By bringing together a group of researchers around a common theme of older couples, this project proposes to develop specific competences on these theme to publish original research in international journals in demography, sociology and economics. It will also enlighten public debate concerning this population whose importance will only grow in the future. This could guide public policy in the fight against poverty among the elderly or access to information about the rights and consequences of different marital states.