Cooperative owners have a transactional relationship - as customers or input suppliers - with their firm in addition to their investment relationship. This changes both the incentives and the information that owners have to monitor managerial performance. We argue that this difference reduces...

In developing countries, moneylenders who lend to farmers monitor them to make sure that their investment is not diverted. Similarly, modern production contracts offered by supermarkets or agro-export firms entail a loan component under the form of input advances and, like traditional...

Participants in U.S. markets for live cattle increasingly rely on federal grading standards to price slaughtered animals. This change is due to the growing prominence of "grid" pricing mechanisms that specify explicit premiums and discounts contingent on an animal's graded quality class....

We study incentives for information sharing (about uncertain future demand for final output) among agricultural intermediaries in imperfectly competitive markets for farm output. Information sharing always increases expected grower and consumer surplus, but may reduce expected intermediary...

We study the incidence and economic rationale for cooperative bargaining in U.S. agricultural markets. Bargaining is not just about increasing price paid to farmers; indeed, there is no empirical research indicating that cooperative bargaining has any direct influence on price. Nevertheless, the...

We study the incidence and economic rationale for cooperative bargaining in U.S. agricultural markets. Bargaining is not just about increasing price paid to farmers; indeed, there is no empirical research indicating that cooperative bargaining has any direct influence on price. Nevertheless, the...

Live cattle are increasingly priced as an explicit function of U.S. Department of Agriculture yield and quality grades. Human graders visually inspect each slaughtered carcass and call grades in a matter of seconds as the carcass passes on a moving trolley. We examine whether there is systematic...

We use historical variation in the market share of agricultural cooperatives to examine the nature of the cooperative firm. Our data include the share of sectoral output accounted for by cooperative firms across 15 commodity sectors during the period 1930-2002. We test a simple financial...

The West Liberty Foods turkey cooperative formed in 1996 to purchase the assets and assume operations of Louis Rich Foods. Based on field interviews with grower members and company management, we describe changes in the economic relationship between growers and the company that resulted from the...

We study incentives for information sharing among agricultural intermediaries in imperfectly competitive markets for farm output. Information sharing always increases expected grower and total surplus, but may reduce expected intermediary profits. Even when expected profits increase with...