Milk production is seasonal in many European countries. While quantity seasonality poses capacity management problems for dairy processors, a European Union policy goal is to reduce price seasonality. After developing a model of endogenous seasonality, we study the effects of three E.U. policies...

The typical firm produces for sale a plural number of distinct product lines. This paper characterizes the composition of a firm?s optimal production vector as a function of cost and revenue function attributes. The approach taken applies mathematical group theory and revealed preference...

When adjustment costs are present, cyclical preference and technology heterogeneities in a product’s markets induce cycles in production. We exploit cyclic and dihedral group invariances in an industry’s cost technology to describe these patterns. We show when equilibrium cyclical pricing...

A prominent facet of recent changes in agriculture has been the advent of precision breeding techniques. Another has been an increase in the level of information inputs and outputs associated with agricultural production. This paper identifies ways in which these features may complement in...

We explore connections between the certainty equivalent return (CER) functional and the underlying utility function. Curvature properties of the functional depend upon how utility function attributes relate to hyperbolic absolute risk aversion (HARA) type utility functions. If the CER functional...

We study trade patterns in a pure exchange economy where preferences are symmetric up to taste intensity parameters. In a 2-person, 2-good endowment economy, then all endowments in a particular Edgeworth box rectangle require trading out of that rectangle. Under strictly quasi-concave...

Trade in feeder animals creates externalities when animal diseases can spread beyond the purchasing farm. If growers choose between open and closed production systems, then Nash equilibrium likely involves excessive trading. While first-best equilibrium involves market-wide adoption of either an...

An issue when seeking to identify rotation choice is persistence in yield-enhancement and input-saving carry-over effects. Focusing on carry-over length and the monoculture decision, we use quasi-convexity of choice functions to develop price-independent and price-dependent principles concerning...

The invisible hand theorem relates nothing about the attributes of the optimal allocation vector. In this paper, we identify a convex cone of functions such that order on vectors of exogenous heterogeneity parameters induces component-wise order on allocation vectors for firms in an efficient...

Our context involves N firms producing M products at constant marginal costs, and behaving as Cournot oligopolists. When preferences are quasi-linear, we study the relationships between second moments of unit costs and second moments of firm-level production. Larger variance in unit costs of a...