The objective of this paper is to test whether broiler processors, after observing their contract growers' abilities in the sequences of repeated short-term contracts, strategically allocate production inputs of varying quality. The strategy can either consist of providing high ability agents...

Grower discontent with tournaments as mechanisms for settling poultry contracts can largely be attributed to the group composition risk that tournaments impose on growers. This paper focuses on the welfare effects of a widely advocated regulatory proposal to prevent integrator companies from...

The broiler industry presents two puzzles regarding production contracts: why do processors control growers' inputs, and why do they use a statistically insufficient estimator to calculate growers' compensation? This paper provides an agency theoretic framework that explains these puzzles in...