Modeling the Effects of Restricting Packer-Owned Livestock in the U.S. Swine Industry

An imperfectly competitive model of processor (packer) behavior is formulated to estimate welfare effects from restricting alternative marketing arrangements of livestock procured by packers. Pork was aggregated into a composite good and hog supply was partitioned into negotiated (spot), contract, and packer-owned. The model was estimated with the dynamic SUR method using weekly Mandatory Price Reporting (MPR) hog and pork data from 2001 to 2005. The model incorporates production uncertainty by modeling expected pork output as expected output in the input demand functions. The welfare effects from banning packer-owned hogs indicate that independent producers, consumers, and packers all would lose. Copyright 2010, Oxford University Press.