The purpose of this paper is to explore the issues that may affect the integration (i.e., the relationships) between the different actors that comprise a supply chain. Whist the theoretical part of the paper can be referred to any supply chain, the empirical part is focused on the UK barley to...

The AgroGeoTrace (AGT) project makes use of Geographical Information Systems and multichannel information technologies to facilitate the access of final consumers to local food speciality products. The project builds a prototype of an informative system designed, first, to help consumers to...

Nowadays food products are increasingly produced in supply chain networks that involve numerous firms. Due to their pyramidal-hierarchical structure, such networks possess a focal company that coordinates the network. The managerial task of the focal company is to work out collective strategy...

In the 1950s and 1960s there was a debate about the nature of an agricultural cooperative: the cooperative as extension of the farm, the cooperative as vertical integration or the cooperative as a firm. We revisit this debate with various concepts from the theory of the firm that have been...

Farmers who produce multiple outputs are portfolio managers in the sense that they use inputs to balance expected economic return and variance of return. This paper estimates the structure of the stochastic multi-output production technology in Norwegian dairy farming, allowing for a more...

The paper analyzes competition among supermarkets in Brazil. In contrast to part of the economic literature which suggests that the fast growth of big supermarket chains would destroy independent, medium and small supermarkets, the paper argues that big supermarket chains can coexist with...

Several recent cases judged by the Court of Justice of the European Communities have raised interesting issues on the possibility for operators of food chains to use national quality signs indicating a territory of origin, different from the European regulatory ones (Protected Geographical...

Trade credit is an important way of firm financing. Its habitual practice and the excessive enlargement of the payment periods deteriorate profitability of firms and even could affect the performance of the financial system. In spite of the relevance of this issue there are few empirical...

This paper develops an original framework to better understand the interaction between the development of brands and the quality of raw materials. We consider different levels of consumer trust for a brand and we examine the incentive for firms to improve the quality of a processed product by...