Slotting fees are fixed charges paid by food manufacturers to retailers for access to the retail market. The role of the practice and its effects on market efficiency are highly controversial. To date, the literature has focused on the effect of the practice on retail prices; however, slotting...

Over the past two decades, consumer demand for niche products has grown substantially. The primary objective of this paper is to disentangle the value consumers place on two prominent food claims, organic and local (defined as Colorado Proud in this study) as they relate to fresh produce. Using...

Replaced with revised version of paper 07/18/10.

The increasing use of production contracts in the hog sector has reduced the number of spot market transactions, raised concerns about price manipulation and helped to spur legislation requiring price reporting by packers. Using data from the 2002 and 2007 Censuses of Agriculture, this study...

In this paper, the new empirical industrial organization approach with a dynamic model is simultaneously employed to measure the degree of oligopoly, oligopsony power, and cost efficiency in the U.S. beef packing industry. The oligopsony power is estimated with two effects: cash cattle...

This work analyzes the effects of ethnic heterogeneity on credit and entrepreneurship in The Gambia. We develop a model of credit transactions based on ethnic density, which shows that where formal credit markets fail denser ethnic groups will have better access to credit. This work places a...

In this paper we study a farmer-processor relationship, where market power is bidirectional: processors have buyer as well as seller market power. Farmers supply a homogeneous raw input to the processors, which, in turn, process it into a horizontally differentiated product. The analysis shows...

Abstract: This paper examines the factors that influence earned income of organic farmers given their decisions to engage in local selling. The model explicitly accounts for the sorting of producers across different levels of commitment to local sales on the basis of both observable and...