Economic historians tend to explain the rise of the cooperative form in agriculture from the advantage of cooperative over private factories in reducing transaction costs with suppliers. This study provides a first test of this thesis using data on 1130 dairy factories in The Netherlands....

The thesis advanced in this paper holds that any transaction cost explanation of the diffusion of a particular organizational form requires an evolutionary analysis of differential performance of competing organizational forms over time. Using data on 1141 dairy factories in The Netherlands, we...