This research provides an overview of the development of the Tokyo Grain Exchange non-GMO soybean contract as an identity preserved futures contract. The development of this contract is unique, relative to the development of other new futures contracts, in that a mature conventional soybean...

The purpose of this paper is to examine the extent to which trust directly affects public support for biotechnology, particularly in applications to food production and genetic modification of crop plants. Unlike previous research in which trust is assumed to be exogenous, this paper posits that...

Interviews with Missouri corn and soybean farmers reveal what farmers feel are the most important ethical challenges in agriculture. In contrast to the literature, which characterizes ethical challenges in term of philosophical debates about soil conservation, the use of pesticides and...

A set of inverse wholesale pork primal demand models are estimated to determine the own-quantity flexibility, to ascertain seasonal price fluctuations, and to examine whether the flexibilities change in absolute magnitude over time. Results indicate that the own-quantity flexibility varied...

The paper analyzes the problem of asymmetric information between buyers and sellers in cattle auctions. An illustration is made regarding the vaccinations that the animals receive. Buyers do not know and cannot verify if sellers have vaccinated their animals forcing them to consider...

Conventional wisdom holds that a small and decreasing number of hog slaughter firms are using their "market power" to take advantage of U.S. hog producers. Existing studies have simply calculated industry concentration ratios and assumed/asserted that the performance of such a concentrated...

This paper examines agricultural cooperative organizational models from an ownership rights perspective. Building upon property rights and incomplete contracts theories of the firm, the paper adopts a definition of ownership rights comprising both residual claim and control rights. We argue that...

It is commonly argued in the literature that agricultural cooperatives are financially constrained because they are unable to acquire sufficient risk capital to invest in productive assets. This study examines whether agricultural cooperatives' investment is constrained by estimating...

We examine empirically the relationship between happiness and the ethical decisions of individuals. We use data from the 1995-97 wave of the World Values Survey (WVS) to test the hypothesis that the relationship between happiness and ethics is bicausal in the sense that personal ethics affects...