The PRIMOFOOD project aims to innovate in modelling the effect of food prices on household purchasing behaviour. It is in line with axis 1.5 of the AAPG2019 "Food and Food Systems". The proposed innovations will allow for a better assessment of the effectiveness and distributive effects of nutritional taxation policies. The identification of price effects can be based either on the econometric analysis of existing market data or on the analysis of experimental data generated in lab. Econometric methods may have limited internal validity, while experimental methods have questionable external validity. Our project therefore proposes to address the respective weaknesses of these two methods and, beyond that, to exploit their complementarities. WP1 will develop innovative experimental analyses of price effects. First, using innovative protocols, we will analyze the effect of large price changes, similar to the levels used in micro-simulations of pricing policies, but much larger than the changes observed in market data. The objective is to identify possible salience and reference price effects, which can induce non-linearities and discontinuities in consumer reactions to prices. We will also test the potential complementarities between pricing policies and nutritional labelling of the NutriScore type. We will also study the effects of social norm, cognitive load, and the existence of opportunity costs. WP2 will develop a structural econometric model of quality and quantity demand under multiple constraints. Beyond the usual budget constraint, the model will include a nutritional intake constraint, with possible extension to multiple linear constraints. The objective is to reflect that the choices of some households are constrained by the need to ensure a minimum of energy intake, or for some potentially addictive goods (alcohol and sugar). This econometric modelling work poses various theoretical and practical challenges. The empirical work will use Kantar WorldPanel scanner data on the consumption of non-alcoholic drinks by French households, and will aim in particular to identify the existence of effects of sugar habituation. WP3 will aim to show the possibility of evaluating the ex-ante evaluation of pricing policies by a micro-simulation of taxation policies based on a model that integrates the outcomes of the two work packages. We will first cross-validate the experimental and econometric methods, comparing the econometric approach with the data generated in the experiments. This will allow us to identify opportunities to improve the specifications of the econometric model, an improvement that will be implemented by a Bayesian method. Finally, we will carry out micro-simulations based on the case of the taxation of sweetened drinks, which has been in place in France since 2012. This will allow us to better characterize the effectiveness of this tax, as well as its distributive and welfare impacts on the various socio-economic segments of the population. PRIMOFOOD provides methodological contributions to the scientific communities and to important public policy issues. The team includes researchers covering the spectrum of issues addressed, from fundamental methodological issues to public policy expertise. The project proposes an international approach, with the ambition of replicating part of the work on American data, with a view to comparing food systems. Finally, the project will produce tools to better understand the links between the long-term dynamics of price changes and the sustainability of food systems.

The great majority of children learn their native language effortlessly, and exhibit surprising linguistic knowledge even at a young age. By 6 months, infants already know a few words: when hearing the word “cookie”, they look longer at a picture of a cookie than a picture of a hand. In order to learn those words, the 6-month-old must have been able to extract and store the sound component of words, the “wordform”. In fact, it has been estimated that 1-year-olds have stored and be able to recognize as many as 500 wordforms. The characteristics of the input and mechanisms allowing this surprising development in natural language acquisition have not been studied before. The general goal of the present project is to shed light on how infants achieve, and caregivers promote, early wordform learning in the real world. We will combine theories and methods from linguistics, experimental psychology, automatic speech recognition, and natural language processing as follows. In a first phase, we will use a novel technology allowing daylong recordings to gather a rich and realistic corpus representing infants’ input. We describe the wordforms present in this input by capitalizing on state-of-the-art wordform extraction algorithms. These algorithms vary in terms of the operations they carry out (e.g., extracting repeated sequences, additionally learning the language’s grammar) in different types of signal (e.g., raw acoustic speech, phonemic units). As a result, each makes some unique predictions with respect to the wordforms infants can find in the rich corpus just mentioned. In a second phase, we will check these predictions against infants’ perception, by “reverse engineering” the wordforms they succeed in finding. Previous work has shown that infants prefer frequent wordforms (which they recognize) over others that are low in frequency. A preference for a given wordform is thus a sign that infants have extracted that wordform and stored it for subsequent recognition. Given that many such wordforms need to be tested, we will develop a novel method: the “preference toy”. The toy plays a sound each time the child shakes it. Laboratory-based research with comparable conditions (e.g., preferential listening) suggests that the child will shake the toy more when this results in wordforms he/she recognizes over unrecognized wordforms. By embodying it in an age-appropriate toy, we can provide it to the child to use at home for much longer periods of time. Repeated testing should boost precision, allowing us to check our multiple competing predictions. Given that the algorithms from phase 1 vary in terms of how much knowledge they assume in the learner, we expect different predictions to be true at different ages. In the third phase, we will assess to what extent each child follows a unique path during early lexical acquisition. Since wordform learning necessarily depends on the input presented to the child, unique aspects in that input could explain individual variation across children. To understand the contributions of infant-specific versus common aspects of the input to infants' learning we will combine our innovations from the previous two phases: The child's input is captured through daylong recordings, processed to generate specific predictions, and that same child is tested on those predictions. In addition to gaining a deeper understanding of the acquisition process, this phase paves the way for applied work to be carried out in the future.

At the crossroads of interconnected history, of cultural transfers and of material culture, the scheme Exogenesis proposes to establish the concept of "boundary objects" as objects born to exogenesis, that is to say, the contact with materials, techniques, shapes, skills, or items coming from the antipodes. Since the 16th century, from which era the cognizance of four separate continents has been entrenched, such objects have also been done to perpetuate the link binding Us to the Others (Todorov T., 1989). If the focus on the history of objects is commonplace in the historiography of art, the approach using the most recent anthropological methods relative to objects, conceived as concentrators of meaning, and applying those methods to the study of Europe understood as a meeting ground, is relatively novel. Indeed, using this approach, the focus on "boundary objects" will translate into the analysis of metabolic phenomena. More precisely, studying the usage of “boundary objects” permits to address the history of the construction of the European identity through dialogue with the Others. In such a way, the history of art will itself be driven towards its boundaries. The object as a conveyor is still insufficiently studied as such in the interconnected history of economics, politics or sociology, although it is at times found as an ingredient of historical or artistic speech. A fortiori, the object engendered by a match with an extra-European item has rarely been a point of focus. The scheme proposes to bare remedy to this by pointing to the precise moment when the "exogenous" makes the "endogenous". The making of the meaning of objects by the surrounding context as well as the intrinsic ambivalence of objects (Jeudy-Ballini M.-B. Derlon 2008) are key issues of the scheme. Whatever the surrounding context, nature or provenance, the various terms of production of “boundary objects” will be analysed. "The boundary object" will be regarded as a hub of complex relations which will be analysed from a nexus of selected cases. A paradigmatic "boundary object", the nautilus of the South Pacific Seas mounted by German silversmiths in the late sixteenth century, has been recently described as a "relic holder of a new type” (du Crest S., 2009). Around these particularly meaningful "boundary objects", the status of objects can be addressed effectively so as to further lead the history of art into a more thorough understanding of all its objects. These objects manufactured in Europe, born in the European consciousness, can be understood only in the European context. They do not amount to interbreeding since they have been founders of a European identity they still help build. Taste, imitation, stimulation, hybridisation are essential ingredients of the process of acculturation (Labrusse R., 2011). Based on the analysis of the contextualization, the project proposes to follow the reasons and issues of the production of the « boundary objects » in which the track of their originary exogenesis is still visible. Following this process in the design and making, "boundary objects" have become, and still are, objects of Europe. The relation to the Other, with an interplay of fascination and repulsion, is now made conspicuous by these objects. This process of acculturation generates such "boundary objects" with their shapes. Exogenesis proposes to elicit the related causes and consequences.