The tribute was unanimous, carried on the columns of World from the platform of great French economists, including 2014 Nobel Prize winner Jean Tirole. Marcel Boiteux, who died in September 2023 at the age of 101, left his mark on French industry as CEO and president of EDF, a group in which he launched the French nuclear program.
This world-renowned economist also left extensive academic work that changed the management of the electricity industry and, more generally, of all network industries. Their contribution to the rules for setting prices for electricity and public services in general will give rise to formulas called “Ramsey-Boiteux prices”, which are still taught in economics courses. His work will allow this disciple of Maurice Allais (Nobel Prize 1988) to succeed John Maynard Keynes, Joseph Schumpeter, Irving Fisher, Wassily Leontief, Paul Samuelson and Kenneth Arrow as president of the prestigious Econometric Society.
The question of setting prices in a situation of “imperfect market”, to achieve an “impossible equilibrium”, is one of the favorite topics of economic researchers since the origins of the discipline, with Adam Smith’s reflections on the subject since the 18thmy century. Generations of economists, especially French, have worked on the question: Maurice Allais, Roger Guesnerie, Bernard Cornet, Jean Tirole, Olivier Blanchard… “In the 1990s, in the face of the great liberation movement in industrialized economies, this research took on its full dimension.explains Claude Crampes, professor emeritus at the Toulouse School of Economics. It is then necessary to reorganize the telecommunications, transportation, infrastructure and, of course, energy markets, and define new prices. »
Customer distrust
Marcel Boiteux’s work will be decisive: he lays the foundations for what an efficient system must be for a public service based on a resource whose storage is impossible. Supporters of a central decision-making authority will be opposed by defenders of the law of the market, liberals who believe that supply and demand can come together.
This question of the right price will provide another formidable playing field for economists and sociologists. For decades, researchers have tried to calm the feeling of unfairness in pricing, of customer distrust of those who define the labels. George Homans’ theory of rational choice and Kent Monroe’s theory of price perception remind us of the difficulty of the exercise. In 2008, a survey by the Research Center for the Study and Observation of Living Conditions revealed that less than 5% of respondents stated that the fair price is the generally observed price. He already distinguished dynamic pricing as one of the causes of the loss of consumer orientation and was concerned about its generalization.
