Contracting and other forms of vertical coordination are important parts of the supply chains for many agricultural products. Often the buyer cares about multiple product attributes affected by a grower's actions. Using data that are insulated from common methodological problems, we test whether...

Privatization and market liberalization are widely considered to be complementary reforms in transition economies. This article challenges this view and the closely related “big bang” approach: when pursued too vigorously, privatization may impede the transition process following...

Most agricultural policy analysis assumes that markets are perfectly competitive, despite increasing evidence to the contrary. We demonstrate that the interaction of market power and government intervention may lead to outcomes that are counter to key results of policy analysis for perfectly...

Increasingly, agricultural markets are vertically coordinated. Often a thinning spot market coexists with coordinated transactions, raising the question of how private coordination affects the market as a whole. One of the greatest challenges when analyzing such market-level effects is obtaining...

The broiler industry presents two puzzles regarding production contracts: why do processors control growers' inputs, and why do they use a statistically insufficient estimator to calculate growers' compensation? This paper provides an agency theoretic framework that explains these puzzles in...