The twin problems of moral hazard and adverse selection are often blamed for the lack of insurance for many fruits and vegetables. This paper develops an alternative method of testing for adverse selection that uses a two-stage approach to determine the effects of technical inefficiency on the...

Retailers use sales "price promotions" for a number of potential reasons. There is relatively little research, however, on their strategic role among frequently consumed perishable products. Using a two-stage, nested logit model of retail equilibrium, we show that promotion will be most...

California specialty crop growers are exposed to extreme price volatility, as well as considerable yield volatility caused by fluctuations in temperature, precipitation, and other specific weather events. Weather derivatives do provide a promising market-based solution to managing risks for...

While not ignoring risk, agricultural cooperatives tend to accommodate risk through the holding of internal capital reserves rather than engage in active risk management. A lack of information regarding the risk, returns, and the effect on cooperative financial performance of both traditional...

Proposals for reform of the federal multiple-peril crop insurance program for specialty crops seek to change fees for catastrophic (CAT) insurance from a nominal fifty-dollar per contract registration fee to an actuarially sound premium. Growers argue that this would cause a significant...

Agricultural cooperatives tend to be riskier than investor-oriented firms, both in a business and financial sense. However, cooperative managers are often reluctant to actively manage risk. Although the “risk management irrelevance proposition” suggests that cooperative managers should be...

Product-line length, or variety, is a key competitive tool used by retailers to differentiate themselves from rivals. Theoretical models of price and variety competition suggest that both store and product heterogeneity are key determinants of price and variety strategies, but none test this...

The demand for organic fresh fruits and vegetable continues to grow at a rate far higher than the rest of the produce industry. The cost of meeting organic certification standards, however, has meant that supply has been slow to adjust. With limited supply, we hypothesize that organic suppliers...

Though brand loyalty has been studied extensively in the marketing literature, the relationship between brand loyalty and equilibrium pricing strategies is not well understood. Designing sales pricing strategies involves two key decisions: the percentage reduction in price from the existing...

The objective of this research is to begin exploring the welfare effects of new foodproduct introductions and to determine whether such effects vary depending on the income classification of the customer base to which the products are introduced. In other words, when new products are introduced...