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....

Live cattle are increasingly priced as an explicit function of U.S. Department of Agriculture yield and quality grades. Human graders visually inspect each slaughtered carcass and call grades in a matter of seconds as the carcass passes on a moving trolley. We examine whether there is systematic...

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 ﾓgridﾔ pricing mechanisms that specify explicit premiums and discounts contingent on an animal's graded quality...

The declining share of beef in total U.S. meat consumption has motivated industry-ï¾­wide 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 represents...

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 represents...

As Congress develops new farm legislation, some are lobbying for a new partnership between U.S. taxpayers and farmers. In exchange for an annual transfer of $10 to $20billion from taxpayers to agriculture, farmers would do much more to enhance environmental quality. An attractive feature of a...

We study incentives for information sharing (about uncertain future demand for final output) among firms in imperfectly competitive markets for farm output. Information sharing generally leads to increases in expected total welfare but may reduce expected firm profits. Even when expected firm...

We study business organization and coordination of specialty-market hog production using a comparative analysis of two Iowa pork niche-marketing firms. We describe and analyze each firm's management of five key organizational challenges: planning and logistics, quality assurance, process...