Modelo Principal-Agente para contratos entre pequenos produtores e empresa exportadora de manga no Rio Grande do Norte

Fruit production is an activity of great importance in the Braziliancommercial balance and even more in the Northeastern region.Intermediation is a regular practice in the fruit exporting market due toexistence of requirements, such as quality certificates, and of internalproblems in production and commercialization, such as credit limitationsand absence of product standardization. Large companies, cooperatives,associations and NGOs receive products from many small producersand export them together with their own products. In Northeast,it is common that the exporting agent offers contracts to producers thatinclude technical, administrative and legal assistance plus input supply.This paper proposes a model, using the principal-agent approach ofgame theory, to the case of contracts between mango exporting agentsand small producers, in Rio Grande do Norte. The contract type chosenby most of the producers is optimal for both parts and leads producers toapply a high level of effort in their production. However, in the long run,these contracts may be changed with strong impact on the small producers.Extensions of the model can include bargaining in the negotiationsor temporal changes, moving from static to dynamic game cases.