Participants in U.S. markets for live cattle increasingly rely on federal grading standards to price slaughtered animals. This change is due to the growing prominence of "grid" pricing mechanisms that specify explicit premiums and discounts contingent on an animal's graded quality class....

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...