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...