Professional market advisory services provide specific advice (advisory programs) to grain producers on how to market their commodities, and assist them in their efforts to manage price risk. Previous studies analyzed the effectiveness of individual services and could find only weak evidence...

A Bayesian hierarchical approach is employed to estimate individual expected performance of agricultural market advisory services. Skeptical beliefs based on market efficiency are incorporated as prior information. For a skeptical decision maker who is willing to follow an advisory program only...

This article develops measures of marketing style for advisory programs in corn and soybeans and estimates the relationship between style characteristics and pricing performance. Style is measured by the intensity of futures and options use, degree of activeness in marketing, and seasonality of...

This article uses Nordhaus' framework to determine the efficiency of the revision process for USDA corn and soybean production forecasts over the 1970/1971 through 2004/2005 marketing years. Positive autocorrelation and consistency of directional changes in forecast revisions suggest these...

USDA World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates (WASDE) price forecasts are published as an interval, but are typically analyzed as point estimates. Thus, all information about uncertainty imbedded in the forecast is ignored. The purpose of this article is to evaluate the accuracy of WASDE...

A large percentage of farmers do not respond to mail surveys. To gain insight into why farmers do not respond and how to improve response rates, a three-step research design was developed. First, an initial survey, based on in-person interviews with 15 farmers, was sent to 100 farmers. Second,...

Producers have a wide variety of risk management instruments available, making their choice(s) complex. The way producers deal with this complexity can vary and may influence the impact that the determinants, such as risk aversion, have on their choices. A recently developed choice bracketing...

This study investigates the impact of U.S. Department of Agriculture World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimate (WASDE) reports on implied volatility in corn and soybean markets over 1985 to 2002. If WASDE reports resolve uncertainty, implied volatility should drop immediately after release...