Direct regulation of school lunch content seems an intuitive approach for improving the nutrition of many American children. However, little is known about substitution patterns in response to such efforts, particular the likelihood that children and parents will turn to competitive foods...

Replaced with revised version of paper on 06/11/07.

The central part of pricing agricultural commodity futures options is to find appropriate stochastic process of the underlying assets. The Black's (1976) futures option pricing model laid the foundation for a new era of futures option valuation theory. The geometric Brownian motion assumption...

Replaced with revised version of paper 07/15/08.

The form and regulation of contracts is of increasing importance to agricultural economists as farmers and agribusinesses increasing rely on contracts rather than markets to acquire inputs and sell outputs. We focus on the differences between the joint and individual surplus achievable under...

A model of vertical quality differentiation is used to analyze the introduction of continuous and binary labeling in a market for credence goods with process attributes under autarky and free trade. The results indicate that continuous labeling increases welfare under autarky and free trade so...

Post-slaughter quality-based pricing of cattle is increasingly common. This quality, however, is dependent upon unobservable quality characteristics of the feeder cattle used as inputs. Through stochastic simulation we construct incentive compatible quality risk-sharing contracts based upon...

We find sale prices and net revenues received by sellers in the Midwestern club pig market are higher at traditional face-to-face auctions than at comparable Internet auctions. The comparison overcomes adverse selection issues that commonly plague such analyses by using data from sellers that...