To many people, futures trading is a little understood and rather suspicious activity. The word most often associated with this trading is "speculation", the idea being that most of those involved in futures markets are gamblers in a high stakes game seeking profit at the expense of those...

As contractual agriculture expands, contract design offers a non-regulatory opportunity to reduce non-point source pollution. A risk programming analysis of seed corn contract designs illustrates a tractable empirical principal-agent model, and shows that grower risk preferences affect contract...

Implicit in most applications of the expected utility (EU) model is the assumption that only the decision maker's own income matters. Moreover, studies that estimate risk preferences typically measure how individuals respond to changes in the level and likelihood of having their own income...

This is a revised copy of Staff Paper 2000-48.

Agriculture development efforts in the past have focused heavily on increasing aggregate output in less developed countries (LDC). In the last 2-3 decades, technology served as a key policy instrument used by developed countries to aid the less developed ones. However, such a policy had led to...