Photo Moustapha Sarr

MOUSTAPHA SARR

JEUNES DOCTEURS ET ATER

Research interests

  • arrow_right Microéconomie
  • arrow_right Economie expérimentale et du comportement
  • arrow_right Alimentation
  • arrow_right Normes sociales

Research group

    Comportements, Droits et Bien-être

HAL open science

Contact

2025-45

Targeting the Inter-generational Transmission of Food Preferences: the Influence of Public Decision-Makers

Moustapha Sarr

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Abstract
This paper analyzes the impact of the public decision-maker on the intergenerational transmission of food preferences. We develop a theoretical model of food preferences inter-generational transmission in which parents transmit their own food preferences to their children through their food practices but also have a concern for the future public health conditions influenced by their feeding efforts. We find that, even if people fully care about future public health, the mechanism of food preferences transmission leads to a heterogeneous population where unhealthy food preferences persist. In this setup, we show that public interventions (public good provision and nutritional education program) induce a distribution of food preferences which converge to an homogeneous population with healthy food preferences.
Mot(s) clé(s)
socialization effort, food preferences, inter-generational transmission, public health, public good provision, nutritional education program
2025-42

The effect of social norms on parents’ beliefs and food choices Evidence from a Lab-in-the-Field Experiment

Noémi Berlin, Tarek Jaber-Lopez, Moustapha Sarr

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Abstract
In a lab-in-the-field experiment, we investigate the influence of social norms on 300 parents’ beliefs regarding the nutritional quality of food items and their subsequent food choices. We use a 3 × 2 between-subject experimental design where we vary two factors: 1-the social norm provided to parents: a descriptive norm (what other parents choose) vs. an injunctive norm (what other parents approve of), and 2-the recipient of the food decisions made by parents: their own child vs. an unknown child. Parents participate in a two-stage process. In the first stage, we elicit their beliefs regarding the nutritional quality of various food items and ask them to make a food basket without specific information. In the second stage, based on their assigned treatment, they receive specific information and repeat the belief elicitation and the food basket selection tasks. We find that only the descriptive norm significantly reduces parents’ overestimation rate of items’ nutritional quality. Injunctive norm significantly improves the nutritional quality of both, the parent’s and child’s baskets. Descriptive norm significantly improves the nutritional quality of child’s baskets only when parents are choosing for unknown child.
Mot(s) clé(s)
social norms, information provision, food choices, food beliefs, parent, child
2023-13

Inciting Family Healthy Eating: Taxation and Nudging

Moustapha Sarr

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Abstract
This paper examines whether a tax on unhealthy food and a nudge are suitable to promote families healthy eating. We consider, in a theoretical model, an economy composed of two types of family that differ in their income and their nutritional knowledge, which reflects their degree of misperception of the future health effects of diet, and choose their consumption according to their perceived utility. We find that the decentralized solution of taxation on unhealthy good achieves the first-best optimum if and only if it is possible for the central planner to implement a targeted tax policy. Investigating the case of a mixed policy, we find that taxation of unhealthy food and nudge are probably complementary public policy instruments to promote family healthy eating. The mixed policy reduces both the perception and income gaps between the two family types.
Mot(s) clé(s)
tax, healthy eating, nudge, perception, family environment, nutritional knowledge
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