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Mathis Preti

I am a second year Ph.D. student at Aix-Marseille School of Economics supervised by Yann Bramoullé and Charles Figuières.

I am interested in how industrial lobbies manipulate the scientific process to create doubt and how this affects science.

I will be visiting the University of Ottawa in October-December 2025.

My CV can be found here and you can contact me at mathis.preti[at]univ-amu.fr

Research

Work in Progress

Diversion Research (joined with Yann Bramoullé and Charles Figuières)

Between 1954 and 1998, the tobacco industry funded more than 1,900 research projects at a total cost of $355 million, on topics such as the roles of heredity and nutrition in cancer. Even though legitimate, this research was intended to divert attention from the harmful effects of tobacco. We provide the first formal analysis of such diversion research. We show that special interests may have strong incentives to affect the scientific agenda, even when the research itself is unbiased. This form of scientific lobbying yields large welfare losses and raises concerns about the private funding of research.(Draft available soon)

Presented at: 4th International Conference on Environmental Economics (LEO), 6th QMUL Economics and Finance Workshop (Queen Mary University of London), 9th Mediterranean Workshop in Economic Theory (ESC Rennes School of Business), 5th AMSE Summer School (AMSE), 23rd Louis-André Gérard-Varet (AMSE), 17th Meeting of the Society for Social Choice and Welfare (PSE), 75th European meeting of the Econometric Society (Erasmus School of Economics), AMSE Ph.D. Seminar. (AMSE).

Smoke-Fueled Science: How Tobacco Industry Shapes Scientific Research

To delay regulation, the tobacco industry pioneered scientific lobbying to encourage favorable findings, direct research agendas, and repress unfavorable publications. I aim to provide the first empirical analysis of how its $355 million in research funding between 1954 and 1998 affected research output, content, quality, and co-authorship networks. By linking internal tobacco scientific reports with bibliometric data, I built a novel database of researchers funded by tobacco companies during that time, including their publications, career trajectories, and collaboration links.

To be presented at: Doctoral Workshop in Microeconomics (Universität Konstanz), 2025 MAER-Net Colloquium (Univerisity of Ottawa).

Seminars & conferences

2024

4th International Conference on Environmental Economics (LEO), 6th QMUL Economics and Finance Workshop (Queen Mary University of London), 9th Mediterranean Workshop in Economic Theory (ESC Rennes School of Business), 5th AMSE Summer School (AMSE), 23rd Louis-André Gérard-Varet (AMSE), 17th Meeting of the Society for Social Choice and Welfare (PSE), 75th European meeting of the Econometric Society (Erasmus School of Economics)

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