We investigate the economic importance of implicit quality incentives in an agricultural market that lacks the institutional capacity for measuring quality verifiably. We measure the magnitude of implicit price premiums for quality, and we distinguish empirically between hedonic-pricing and...

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...

We use historical variation in the market share of agricultural cooperatives to examine the nature of the cooperative firm. Our data include the share of sectoral output accounted for by cooperative firms across 15 commodity sectors during the period 1930-2002. We test a simple financial...

The declining share of beef in total U.S. meat consumption has motivated industry-wide efforts to improve average beef quality through more effective coordination among the various market participants. Increased use of explicit "grid" pricing mechanisms over the last decade represent initial...

We examine agricultural contracting parties' incentives to employ quality measurement. Quality measurement will be used if on-farm production of ``quality'' is sufficiently cheap, and quality measurement sufficiently informative. We qualitatively test these predictions with empirical observation...

This paper estimates an agency model of contracts used in California's processing-tomato industry. Model estimation proceeds in three stages. We first estimate growers' stochastic production possibilities, and then, for a given vector of preference parameters, compute an optimal compensation...

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...