Purpose – It is generally recognized that consumer cooperatives are at a disadvantage when raising capital as compared to conventional capitalist firms. The purpose of this paper is to explore a method for consumer cooperatives to issue transferable membership shares as financial securities...

It is often argued that cooperative firms are financially less viable than ivestor-owned firms. From a fundamental point of view, however, this does not seem a fair comparison, since the market for firm ownership is usually only available to investor-owned firms in our economy. This paper...