The West Liberty Foods turkey cooperative was formed in 1996 to purchase the assets and assume operations of Louis Rich Foods (an investor-owned processing firm), which, at the time, announced the imminent shutdown of its West Liberty, Iowa, processing facility. We study the creation and...

This paper identifies market and commodity characteristics that seem to support successful cooperative bargaining in markets for farm output. Bargaining is not just about increasing prices paid to farmers; indeed, although there is very little empirical research that addresses the issue, what...

Cooperative formation in agriculture sometimes occurs in response to the exit of a private firm and typically requires substantial equity investment by participating farmers. What economic rationale can explain why farmers are willing to contribute capital to an activity that (apparently) fails...

We study business organization and coordination of specialty-market hog production using a comparative analysis of two Iowa pork niche-marketing firms. We describe and analyze each firm's management of five key organizational challenges: planning and logistics, quality assurance, process...

This papers analyzes efficient regulatory design of a polluting firm who has two kinds of private information about its production environment. First, the firm has better information than the regulator regarding technological possibilities for controlling pollution; and second, some aspects of...

This paper uses extensive data on production outcomes for processing tomato growers in California to examine the efficacy of explicit incentives observed in grower-processor contracts. Our data include all deliveries of tomatoes to some 51 processors over a period of 7 years in which at least 65...

In modern U.S. agriculture, a tenant typically contracts with more than one landlord, although most of the past literature has focused exclusively on bilateral contracts with a single tenant and a single landlord. We argue that, in the presence of contractual externalities under which the...

We study incentives for information sharing (about uncertain future demand for final output) among agricultural intermediaries in imperfectly competitive markets for farm output. Information sharing always increases expected grower and consumer surplus, but may reduce expected intermediary...

This paper examines the motivations underlying the government's choice of particular policy mechanisms for subsidizing agriculture. The analysis suggests that policies involving overproduction by relatively high-cost producers might arise from the perceived connection between the existence of...

We hypothesize that imperfect quality measurement in contracts for fresh fruits and vegetables results in a moral-hazard problem, and that the final price of the produce provides additional information regarding quality. As a consequence, growers are not shielded from all price risk. This...