Dynamique réflexive et transférabilité des compétences : un usage intégré du e-Portfolio en spécialisation

Dernière étape avant le monde professionnel, un cursus de spécialisation est un lieu de discussion, au carrefour des savoirs et des savoir-faire, permettant aux étudiants d'envisager sous un angle nouveau les contenus enseignés à l'université. Il ne s'agit plus seulement d'acquérir des connaissances mais aussi de développer des compétences transférables à d'autres types d'activité. L'équipe en charge de la spécialisation en Analyse du discours et de la communication publics proposée par la Faculté des Lettres de l'Université de Lausanne a oeuvré à l'intégration d'un nouvel outil informatique, le e-Portfolio, destiné à faciliter l'expression et la documentation des compétences individuelles développées par l'étudiant lors de son parcours de formation.

A Structural Analysis of the Health Expenditures and Portfolio Choices of Retired Agents

Richer and healthier agents tend to hold riskier portfolios and spend proportionally less on health expenditures. Potential explanations include health and wealth effects on preferences, expected longevity or disposable total wealth. Using HRS data, we perform a structural estimation of a dynamic model of consumption, portfolio and health expenditure choices with recursive utility, as well as health-dependent income and mortality risk. Our estimates of the deep parameters highlight the importance of health capital, mortality risk control, convex health and mortality adjustment costs and binding liquidity constraints to rationalize the stylized facts. They also provide new perspectives on expected longevity and on the values of life and health.

Three essays in financial economics: asset pricing, optimal portfolio selection and financial integration

Executive Summary The unifying theme of this thesis is the pursuit of a satisfactory ways to quantify the riskureward trade-off in financial economics. First in the context of a general asset pricing model, then across models and finally across country borders. The guiding principle in that pursuit was to seek innovative solutions by combining ideas from different fields in economics and broad scientific research. For example, in the first part of this thesis we sought a fruitful application of strong existence results in utility theory to topics in asset pricing. In the second part we implement an idea from the field of fuzzy set theory to the optimal portfolio selection problem, while the third part of this thesis is to the best of our knowledge, the first empirical application of some general results in asset pricing in incomplete markets to the important topic of measurement of financial integration. While the first two parts of this thesis effectively combine well-known ways to quantify the risk-reward trade-offs the third one can be viewed as an empirical verification of the usefulness of the so-called "good deal bounds" theory in designing risk-sensitive pricing bounds. Chapter 1 develops a discrete-time asset pricing model, based on a novel ordinally equivalent representation of recursive utility. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to use a member of a novel class of recursive utility generators to construct a representative agent model to address some long-lasting issues in asset pricing. Applying strong representation results allows us to show that the model features countercyclical risk premia, for both consumption and financial risk, together with low and procyclical risk free rate. As the recursive utility used nests as a special case the well-known time-state separable utility, all results nest the corresponding ones from the standard model and thus shed light on its well-known shortcomings. The empirical investigation to support these theoretical results, however, showed that as long as one resorts to econometric methods based on approximating conditional moments with unconditional ones, it is not possible to distinguish the model we propose from the standard one. Chapter 2 is a join work with Sergei Sontchik. There we provide theoretical and empirical motivation for aggregation of performance measures. The main idea is that as it makes sense to apply several performance measures ex-post, it also makes sense to base optimal portfolio selection on ex-ante maximization of as many possible performance measures as desired. We thus offer a concrete algorithm for optimal portfolio selection via ex-ante optimization over different horizons of several risk-return trade-offs simultaneously. An empirical application of that algorithm, using seven popular performance measures, suggests that realized returns feature better distributional characteristics relative to those of realized returns from portfolio strategies optimal with respect to single performance measures. When comparing the distributions of realized returns we used two partial risk-reward orderings first and second order stochastic dominance. We first used the Kolmogorov Smirnov test to determine if the two distributions are indeed different, which combined with a visual inspection allowed us to demonstrate that the way we propose to aggregate performance measures leads to portfolio realized returns that first order stochastically dominate the ones that result from optimization only with respect to, for example, Treynor ratio and Jensen's alpha. We checked for second order stochastic dominance via point wise comparison of the so-called absolute Lorenz curve, or the sequence of expected shortfalls for a range of quantiles. As soon as the plot of the absolute Lorenz curve for the aggregated performance measures was above the one corresponding to each individual measure, we were tempted to conclude that the algorithm we propose leads to portfolio returns distribution that second order stochastically dominates virtually all performance measures considered. Chapter 3 proposes a measure of financial integration, based on recent advances in asset pricing in incomplete markets. Given a base market (a set of traded assets) and an index of another market, we propose to measure financial integration through time by the size of the spread between the pricing bounds of the market index, relative to the base market. The bigger the spread around country index A, viewed from market B, the less integrated markets A and B are. We investigate the presence of structural breaks in the size of the spread for EMU member country indices before and after the introduction of the Euro. We find evidence that both the level and the volatility of our financial integration measure increased after the introduction of the Euro. That counterintuitive result suggests the presence of an inherent weakness in the attempt to measure financial integration independently of economic fundamentals. Nevertheless, the results about the bounds on the risk free rate appear plausible from the view point of existing economic theory about the impact of integration on interest rates.

A Reappraisal of the Allocation Puzzle through the Portfolio Approach

Paradoxically, high-growth, high-investment developing countries tend to experience capital outflows. This paper shows that this allocation puzzle can be explained simply by introducing uninsurable idiosyncratic investment risk in the neoclassical growth model with international trade in bonds, and by taking into account not only TFP catch-up, but also the capital wedge, that is, the distortions on the return to capital. The model fits the two following facts, documented on a sample of 67 countries between 1980 and 2003: (i) TFP growth is positively correlated with capital outflows in a sample including creditor countries; (ii) the long-run level of capital per efficient unit of labor is positively correlated with capital outflows. Consistently, we show that the capital flows predicted by the model are positively correlated with the actual ones in this sample once the capital wedge is accounted for. The fact that Asia dominates global imbalances can be explained by its relatively low capital wedge.

Three essays on the psychology of investment and financial markets

Préface My thesis consists of three essays where I consider equilibrium asset prices and investment strategies when the market is likely to experience crashes and possibly sharp windfalls. Although each part is written as an independent and self contained article, the papers share a common behavioral approach in representing investors preferences regarding to extremal returns. Investors utility is defined over their relative performance rather than over their final wealth position, a method first proposed by Markowitz (1952b) and by Kahneman and Tversky (1979), that I extend to incorporate preferences over extremal outcomes. With the failure of the traditional expected utility models in reproducing the observed stylized features of financial markets, the Prospect theory of Kahneman and Tversky (1979) offered the first significant alternative to the expected utility paradigm by considering that people focus on gains and losses rather than on final positions. Under this setting, Barberis, Huang, and Santos (2000) and McQueen and Vorkink (2004) were able to build a representative agent optimization model which solution reproduced some of the observed risk premium and excess volatility. The research in behavioral finance is relatively new and its potential still to explore. The three essays composing my thesis propose to use and extend this setting to study investors behavior and investment strategies in a market where crashes and sharp windfalls are likely to occur. In the first paper, the preferences of a representative agent, relative to time varying positive and negative extremal thresholds are modelled and estimated. A new utility function that conciliates between expected utility maximization and tail-related performance measures is proposed. The model estimation shows that the representative agent preferences reveals a significant level of crash aversion and lottery-pursuit. Assuming a single risky asset economy the proposed specification is able to reproduce some of the distributional features exhibited by financial return series. The second part proposes and illustrates a preference-based asset allocation model taking into account investors crash aversion. Using the skewed t distribution, optimal allocations are characterized as a resulting tradeoff between the distribution four moments. The specification highlights the preference for odd moments and the aversion for even moments. Qualitatively, optimal portfolios are analyzed in terms of firm characteristics and in a setting that reflects real-time asset allocation, a systematic over-performance is obtained compared to the aggregate stock market. Finally, in my third article, dynamic option-based investment strategies are derived and illustrated for investors presenting downside loss aversion. The problem is solved in closed form when the stock market exhibits stochastic volatility and jumps. The specification of downside loss averse utility functions allows corresponding terminal wealth profiles to be expressed as options on the stochastic discount factor contingent on the loss aversion level. Therefore dynamic strategies reduce to the replicating portfolio using exchange traded and well selected options, and the risky stock.

Behavior of endogenous tumor-associated macrophages assessed in vivo using a functionalized nanoparticle.

Tumor-associated macrophages (TAMs) invade the tumor stroma in many cancers, yet their role is incompletely understood. To visualize and better understand these critical cells in tumor progression, we screened a portfolio of rationally selected, injectable agents to image endogenous TAMs ubiquitously in three different cancer models (colon carcinoma, lung adenocarcinoma, and soft tissue sarcoma). AMTA680, a functionally derivatized magneto-fluorescent nanoparticle, labeled a subset of myeloid cells with an "M2" macrophage phenotype, whereas other neighboring cells, including tumor cells and a variety of other leukocytes, remained unlabeled. We further show that AMTA680-labeled endogenous TAMs are not altered and can be tracked noninvasively at different resolutions and using various imaging modalities, e.g., fluorescence molecular tomography, magnetic resonance imaging, and multiphoton and confocal intravital microscopy. Quantitative assessment of TAM distribution and activity in vivo identified that these cells cluster in delimited foci within tumors, show relatively low motility, and extend cytoplasmic protrusions for prolonged physical interactions with neighboring tumor cells. Noninvasive imaging can also be used to monitor TAM-depleting regimen quantitatively. Thus, AMTA680 or related cell-targeting agents represent appropriate injectable vehicles for in vivo analysis of the tumor microenvironment.

ePortfolio Unil: un projet pilote en sciences du langage

Le projet pilote e-Portfolio offre aux étudiant-e-s la possibilité de créer un dossier portfolio personnalisé et disponible en ligne sur une plateforme informatique. Les dossiers portfolio se partagent en deux familles : les dossiers d'apprentissage (a.), permettant de documenter un cheminement d'apprentissage, et les dossiers de présentation(b.), ayant pour rôle de valoriser les acquis d'une formation ou d'un parcours professionnel. Un e-Portfolio, par la plasticité des outils informatiques qui en forment le support, permet de combiner les deux approches - pédagogique et biographique - en intégrant sur un mode dynamique le parcours de formation, le questionnement des acquis et la présentation curriculaire. (http://www3.unil.ch/wpmu/riset-notice/2010/09/)

Financial Markets and Real Ecinomy: Four Essays in International Trade

Financial markets play an important role in an economy performing various functions like mobilizing and pooling savings, producing information about investment opportunities, screening and monitoring investments, implementation of corporate governance, diversification and management of risk. These functions influence saving rates, investment decisions, technological innovation and, therefore, have important implications for welfare. In my PhD dissertation I examine the interplay of financial and product markets by looking at different channels through which financial markets may influence an economy.My dissertation consists of four chapters. The first chapter is a co-authored work with Martin Strieborny, a PhD student from the University of Lausanne. The second chapter is a co-authored work with Melise Jaud, a PhD student from the Paris School of Economics. The third chapter is co-authored with both Melise Jaud and Martin Strieborny. The last chapter of my PhD dissertation is a single author paper.Chapter 1 of my PhD thesis analyzes the effect of financial development on growth of contract intensive industries. These industries intensively use intermediate inputs that neither can be sold on organized exchange, nor are reference-priced (Levchenko, 2007; Nunn, 2007). A typical example of a contract intensive industry would be an industry where an upstream supplier has to make investments in order to customize a product for needs of a downstream buyer. After the investment is made and the product is adjusted, the buyer may refuse to meet a commitment and trigger ex post renegotiation. Since the product is customized to the buyer's needs, the supplier cannot sell the product to a different buyer at the original price. This is referred in the literature as the holdup problem. As a consequence, the individually rational suppliers will underinvest into relationship-specific assets, hurting the downstream firms with negative consequences for aggregate growth. The standard way to mitigate the hold up problem is to write a binding contract and to rely on the legal enforcement by the state. However, even the most effective contract enforcement might fail to protect the supplier in tough times when the buyer lacks a reliable source of external financing. This suggests the potential role of financial intermediaries, banks in particular, in mitigating the incomplete contract problem. First, financial products like letters of credit and letters of guarantee can substantially decrease a risk and transaction costs of parties. Second, a bank loan can serve as a signal about a buyer's true financial situation, an upstream firm will be more willing undertake relationship-specific investment knowing that the business partner is creditworthy and will abstain from myopic behavior (Fama, 1985; von Thadden, 1995). Therefore, a well-developed financial (especially banking) system should disproportionately benefit contract intensive industries.The empirical test confirms this hypothesis. Indeed, contract intensive industries seem to grow faster in countries with a well developed financial system. Furthermore, this effect comes from a more developed banking sector rather than from a deeper stock market. These results are reaffirmed examining the effect of US bank deregulation on the growth of contract intensive industries in different states. Beyond an overall pro-growth effect, the bank deregulation seems to disproportionately benefit the industries requiring relationship-specific investments from their suppliers.Chapter 2 of my PhD focuses on the role of the financial sector in promoting exports of developing countries. In particular, it investigates how credit constraints affect the ability of firms operating in agri-food sectors of developing countries to keep exporting to foreign markets.Trade in high-value agri-food products from developing countries has expanded enormously over the last two decades offering opportunities for development. However, trade in agri-food is governed by a growing array of standards. Sanitary and Phytosanitary standards (SPS) and technical regulations impose additional sunk, fixed and operating costs along the firms' export life. Such costs may be detrimental to firms' survival, "pricing out" producers that cannot comply. The existence of these costs suggests a potential role of credit constraints in shaping the duration of trade relationships on foreign markets. A well-developed financial system provides the funds to exporters necessary to adjust production processes in order to meet quality and quantity requirements in foreign markets and to maintain long-standing trade relationships. The products with higher needs for financing should benefit the most from a well functioning financial system. This differential effect calls for a difference-in-difference approach initially proposed by Rajan and Zingales (1998). As a proxy for demand for financing of agri-food products, the sanitary risk index developed by Jaud et al. (2009) is used. The empirical literature on standards and norms show high costs of compliance, both variable and fixed, for high-value food products (Garcia-Martinez and Poole, 2004; Maskus et al., 2005). The sanitary risk index reflects the propensity of products to fail health and safety controls on the European Union (EU) market. Given the high costs of compliance, the sanitary risk index captures the demand for external financing to comply with such regulations.The prediction is empirically tested examining the export survival of different agri-food products from firms operating in Ghana, Mali, Malawi, Senegal and Tanzania. The results suggest that agri-food products that require more financing to keep up with food safety regulation of the destination market, indeed sustain longer in foreign market, when they are exported from countries with better developed financial markets.Chapter 3 analyzes the link between financial markets and efficiency of resource allocation in an economy. Producing and exporting products inconsistent with a country's factor endowments constitutes a serious misallocation of funds, which undermines competitiveness of the economy and inhibits its long term growth. In this chapter, inefficient exporting patterns are analyzed through the lens of the agency theories from the corporate finance literature. Managers may pursue projects with negative net present values because their perquisites or even their job might depend on them. Exporting activities are particularly prone to this problem. Business related to foreign markets involves both high levels of additional spending and strong incentives for managers to overinvest. Rational managers might have incentives to push for exports that use country's scarce factors which is suboptimal from a social point of view. Export subsidies might further skew the incentives towards inefficient exporting. Management can divert the export subsidies into investments promoting inefficient exporting.Corporate finance literature stresses the disciplining role of outside debt in counteracting the internal pressures to divert such "free cash flow" into unprofitable investments. Managers can lose both their reputation and the control of "their" firm if the unpaid external debt triggers a bankruptcy procedure. The threat of possible failure to satisfy debt service payments pushes the managers toward an efficient use of available resources (Jensen, 1986; Stulz, 1990; Hart and Moore, 1995). The main sources of debt financing in the most countries are banks. The disciplining role of banks might be especially important in the countries suffering from insufficient judicial quality. Banks, in pursuing their rights, rely on comparatively simple legal interventions that can be implemented even by mediocre courts. In addition to their disciplining role, banks can promote efficient exporting patterns in a more direct way by relaxing credit constraints of producers, through screening, identifying and investing in the most profitable investment projects. Therefore, a well-developed domestic financial system, and particular banking system, would help to push a country's exports towards products congruent with its comparative advantage.This prediction is tested looking at the survival of different product categories exported to US market. Products are identified according to the Euclidian distance between their revealed factor intensity and the country's factor endowments. The results suggest that products suffering from a comparative disadvantage (labour-intensive products from capital-abundant countries) survive less on the competitive US market. This pattern is stronger if the exporting country has a well-developed banking system. Thus, a strong banking sector promotes exports consistent with a country comparative advantage.Chapter 4 of my PhD thesis further examines the role of financial markets in fostering efficient resource allocation in an economy. In particular, the allocative efficiency hypothesis is investigated in the context of equity market liberalization.Many empirical studies document a positive and significant effect of financial liberalization on growth (Levchenko et al. 2009; Quinn and Toyoda 2009; Bekaert et al., 2005). However, the decrease in the cost of capital and the associated growth in investment appears rather modest in comparison to the large GDP growth effect (Bekaert and Harvey, 2005; Henry, 2000, 2003). Therefore, financial liberalization may have a positive impact on growth through its effect on the allocation of funds across firms and sectors.Free access to international capital markets allows the largest and most profitable domestic firms to borrow funds in foreign markets (Rajan and Zingales, 2003). As domestic banks loose some of their best clients, they reoptimize their lending practices seeking new clients among small and younger industrial firms. These firms are likely to be more risky than large and established companies. Screening of customers becomes prevalent as the return to screening rises. Banks, ceteris paribus, tend to focus on firms operating in comparative-advantage sectors because they are better risks. Firms in comparative-disadvantage sectors finding it harder to finance their entry into or survival in export markets either exit or refrain from entering export markets. On aggregate, one should therefore expect to see less entry, more exit, and shorter survival on export markets in those sectors after financial liberalization.The paper investigates the effect of financial liberalization on a country's export pattern by comparing the dynamics of entry and exit of different products in a country export portfolio before and after financial liberalization.The results suggest that products that lie far from the country's comparative advantage set tend to disappear relatively faster from the country's export portfolio following the liberalization of financial markets. In other words, financial liberalization tends to rebalance the composition of a country's export portfolio towards the products that intensively use the economy's abundant factors.

Health and (other) Asset Holdings

The empirical literature on the asset allocation and medical expenditures of U.S. households consistently shows that risky portfolio shares are increasing in both wealth and health whereas health investment shares are decreasing in these same variables. Despite this evidence, most of the existing models treat financial and health-related choices separately. This paper bridges this gap by proposing a tractable framework for the joint determination of optimal consumption, portfolio and health investments. We solve for the optimal rules in closed form and show that the model can theoretically reproduce the empirical facts. Capitalizing on this closed-form solution, we perform a structural estimation of the model on HRS data. Our parameter estimates are reasonable and confirm the relevance of all the main characteristics of the model.

iLOGP: A Simple, Robust, and Efficient Description of n-Octanol/Water Partition Coefficient for Drug Design Using the GB/SA Approach.

The n-octanol/water partition coefficient (log Po/w) is a key physicochemical parameter for drug discovery, design, and development. Here, we present a physics-based approach that shows a strong linear correlation between the computed solvation free energy in implicit solvents and the experimental log Po/w on a cleansed data set of more than 17,500 molecules. After internal validation by five-fold cross-validation and data randomization, the predictive power of the most interesting multiple linear model, based on two GB/SA parameters solely, was tested on two different external sets of molecules. On the Martel druglike test set, the predictive power of the best model (N = 706, r = 0.64, MAE = 1.18, and RMSE = 1.40) is similar to six well-established empirical methods. On the 17-drug test set, our model outperformed all compared empirical methodologies (N = 17, r = 0.94, MAE = 0.38, and RMSE = 0.52). The physical basis of our original GB/SA approach together with its predictive capacity, computational efficiency (1 to 2 s per molecule), and tridimensional molecular graphics capability lay the foundations for a promising predictor, the implicit log P method (iLOGP), to complement the portfolio of drug design tools developed and provided by the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics.

Monitoring natural hazards

Few subjects have caught the attention of the entire world as much as those dealing with natural hazards. The first decade of this new millennium provides a litany of tragic examples of various hazards that turned into disasters affecting millions of individuals around the globe. The human losses (some 225,000 people) associated with the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, the economic costs (approximately 200 billion USD) of the 2011 Tohoku Japan earthquake, tsunami and reactor event, and the collective social impacts of human tragedies experienced during Hurricane Katrina in 2005 all provide repetitive reminders that we humans are temporary guests occupying a very active and angry planet. Any examples may have been cited here to stress the point that natural events on Earth may, and often do, lead to disasters and catastrophes when humans place themselves into situations of high risk. Few subjects share the true interdisciplinary dependency that characterizes the field of natural hazards. From geology and geophysics to engineering and emergency response to social psychology and economics, the study of natural hazards draws input from an impressive suite of unique and previously independent specializations. Natural hazards provide a common platform to reduce disciplinary boundaries and facilitate a beneficial synergy in the provision of timely and useful information and action on this critical subject matter. As social norms change regarding the concept of acceptable risk and human migration leads to an explosion in the number of megacities, coastal over-crowding and unmanaged habitation in precarious environments such as mountainous slopes, the vulnerability of people and their susceptibility to natural hazards increases dramatically. Coupled with the concerns of changing climates, escalating recovery costs, a growing divergence between more developed and less developed countries, the subject of natural hazards remains on the forefront of issues that affect all people, nations, and environments all the time.This treatise provides a compendium of critical, timely and very detailed information and essential facts regarding the basic attributes of natural hazards and concomitant disasters. The Encyclopedia of Natural Hazards effectively captures and integrates contributions from an international portfolio of almost 300 specialists whose range of expertise addresses over 330 topics pertinent to the field of natural hazards. Disciplinary barriers are overcome in this comprehensive treatment of the subject matter. Clear illustrations and numerous color images enhance the primary aim to communicate and educate. The inclusion of a series of unique ?classic case study? events interspersed throughout the volume provides tangible examples linking concepts, issues, outcomes and solutions. These case studies illustrate different but notable recent, historic and prehistoric events that have shaped the world as we now know it. They provide excellent focal points linking the remaining terms in the volume to the primary field of study. This Encyclopedia of Natural Hazards will remain a standard reference of choice for many years.

Essays in general equilibrium asset pricing

ABSTRACT : Research in empirical asset pricing has pointed out several anomalies both in the cross section and time series of asset prices, as well as in investors' portfolio choice. This dissertation aims to discover the forces driving some of these "puzzling" asset pricing dynamics and portfolio decisions observed in the financial market. Through the dissertation I construct and study dynamic general equilibrium models of heterogeneous investors in the presence of frictions and evaluate quantitatively their implications for financial-market asset prices and portfolio choice. I also explore the potential roots of puzzles in international finance. Chapter 1 shows that, by introducing jointly endogenous no-default type of borrowing constraints and heterogeneous beliefs in a dynamic general-equilibrium economy, many empirical features of stock return volatility can be reproduced. While most of the research on stock return volatility is empirical, this paper provides a theoretical framework that is able to reproduce simultaneously the cross section and time series stylized facts concerning stock returns and their volatility. In contrast to the existing theoretical literature related to stock return volatility, I don't impose persistence or regimes in any of the exogenous state variables or in preferences. Volatility clustering, asymmetry in the stock return-volatility relationship, and pricing of multi-factor volatility components in the cross section all arise endogenously as a consequence of the feedback between the binding of no-default constraints and heterogeneous beliefs. Chapters 2 and 3 explore the implications of differences of opinion across investors in different countries for international asset pricing anomalies. Chapter 2 demonstrates that several international finance "puzzles" can be reproduced by a single risk factor which captures heterogeneous beliefs across international investors. These puzzles include: (i) home equity preference; (ii) the dependence of firm returns on local and foreign factors; (iii) the co-movement of returns and international capital flows; and (iv) abnormal returns around foreign firm cross-listing events in the local market. These are reproduced in a setup with symmetric information and in a perfectly integrated world with multiple countries and independent processes producing the same good. Chapter 3 shows that by extending this framework to multiple goods and correlated production processes; the "forward premium puzzle" arises naturally as a compensation for the heterogeneous expectations about the depreciation of the exchange rate held by international investors. Chapters 2 and 3 propose differences of opinion across international investors as the potential resolution of several international finance `puzzles'. In a globalized world where both capital and information flow freely across countries, this explanation seems more appealing than existing asymmetric information or segmented markets theories aiming to explain international finance puzzles.

Prediction markets supporting technology assessment

In this thesis, we study the use of prediction markets for technology assessment. We particularly focus on their ability to assess complex issues, the design constraints required for such applications and their efficacy compared to traditional techniques. To achieve this, we followed a design science research paradigm, iteratively developing, instantiating, evaluating and refining the design of our artifacts. This allowed us to make multiple contributions, both practical and theoretical. We first showed that prediction markets are adequate for properly assessing complex issues. We also developed a typology of design factors and design propositions for using these markets in a technology assessment context. Then, we showed that they are able to solve some issues related to the R&D portfolio management process and we proposed a roadmap for their implementation. Finally, by comparing the instantiation and the results of a multi-criteria decision method and a prediction market, we showed that the latter are more efficient, while offering similar results. We also proposed a framework for comparing forecasting methods, to identify the constraints based on contingency factors. In conclusion, our research opens a new field of application of prediction markets and should help hasten their adoption by enterprises. Résumé français: Dans cette thèse, nous étudions l'utilisation de marchés de prédictions pour l'évaluation de nouvelles technologies. Nous nous intéressons plus particulièrement aux capacités des marchés de prédictions à évaluer des problématiques complexes, aux contraintes de conception pour une telle utilisation et à leur efficacité par rapport à des techniques traditionnelles. Pour ce faire, nous avons suivi une approche Design Science, développant itérativement plusieurs prototypes, les instanciant, puis les évaluant avant d'en raffiner la conception. Ceci nous a permis de faire de multiples contributions tant pratiques que théoriques. Nous avons tout d'abord montré que les marchés de prédictions étaient adaptés pour correctement apprécier des problématiques complexes. Nous avons également développé une typologie de facteurs de conception ainsi que des propositions de conception pour l'utilisation de ces marchés dans des contextes d'évaluation technologique. Ensuite, nous avons montré que ces marchés pouvaient résoudre une partie des problèmes liés à la gestion des portes-feuille de projets de recherche et développement et proposons une feuille de route pour leur mise en oeuvre. Finalement, en comparant la mise en oeuvre et les résultats d'une méthode de décision multi-critère et d'un marché de prédiction, nous avons montré que ces derniers étaient plus efficaces, tout en offrant des résultats semblables. Nous proposons également un cadre de comparaison des méthodes d'évaluation technologiques, permettant de cerner au mieux les besoins en fonction de facteurs de contingence. En conclusion, notre recherche ouvre un nouveau champ d'application des marchés de prédiction et devrait permettre d'accélérer leur adoption par les entreprises.