Our purpose in this paper is to highlight the role of organizational structure and incentives in the design of contracts between buyers and sellers of agricultural products. In particular, we consider how differences between investor-owned (IOF) and producer-oriented (POF) firms, and differences...

New Institutional Economics is characterized by its real-word orientation and empirical focus. Nowhere is this broader scope more evident than in microeconomic theories of firms and markets. NIE has led researchers not only to crack open the black box of production known as the firm, but also...

Despite the dramatic change in the organization of the US hog industry over the past two decades, the existing literature offers little insight into the decision by pork packers to use long-term marketing contracts, which represent the dominant form of hog procurement transactions. Existing...