This paper estimates welfare losses in thirty-eight U.S. food and tobacco industries at the four-digit SIC level, then relates such losses to market structure and conduct variables to identify the welfare loss determinants. Empirical findings indicate that these losses are higher in markets...

In the context of increasing returns markets, the conventional argument is that a slender market share advantage may entrain a firm on a trajectory bound for monopoly in the long run. We revisit this with the linear urn model representation of history dependence, and a probabilistic...

Specialization in agricultural systems leads to trade-offs between economic gains and ecosystem functions. Economic gains can be maximized when production activities are specialized at increasingly broader scales (from the household to the village, region or above), particularly when markets for...

The purpose of this study is to investigate regional differences in the business characteristics of Japanese agricultural cooperatives (JAs), which have been widely criticized for depending on non-agricultural activities, contradictory to cooperative principles. We construct a panel data set...