Futures Hedging Under Price, Basis and Production Risk

We consider the hedging problem of a firm that has three sources of risk: price, basis, and yield uncertainty. An exact solution for the optimal futures hesge is derived under the assumption that the three random variables are joint normally distributed and that utility is of the CARA type. Unlike the mean-variance approximation applied in previous research, we show that the optimal hedge does depend on risk attitudes, even when the agent perceives the futures price as being unbiased. The theoretical results are applied empirically to the problem of hedging soybean production in Iowa. The exact solution, relying on CARA and normality, is compared with numerical solutions under lognormal distributions and CRRA utility.