The adoption and diffusion of contract farming and vertical integration in modern agriculture has varied widely across regions, commodities, or farm types. This paper lays out a framework for understanding the evolution of organizational practices in U.S. agriculture by drawing on theories of...

There is increasing concern for environmental degradation caused by agricultural activity. Although large-scale agribusinesses are generally implicated, farmers themselves are often seen as culpable. We investigate whether farmer identity is an important factor affecting their attitudes toward...

Oliver Williamson argues that a principal will only trust an agent when there are safeguards to ensure the agent has an incentive for trustworthiness (Williamson, O. E. [1993]. Calculativeness, trust, and economic organization. <italic>The Journal of Law and Economics, 36</italic>, 453-486). However, such...

We hypothesize that an increase in the economic pressures a farmer feels could result in that farmer being more tolerant of unethical conduct than farmers not experiencing economic pressures. To test this hypothesis, we use data from a survey of 3,000 Missouri farmers with farm sales in excess...

The purpose of this article is to examine the extent to which trust directly affects public support for biotechnology, particularly in applications to food production and genetic modification of crop plants. Unlike previous research in which trust is assumed to be exogenous, this article posits...

We analyze the problem of asymmetric information between buyers and sellers in cattle auctions, using the problem of revaccinations as the point of departure. We present a simple model to show that if buyers do not know and cannot verify whether sellers have vaccinated their animals, then they...

We examine how organizational characteristics of producer-owned firms are correlated with the level of perceived trust among cooperative members, using survey data from a sample of U.S. agricultural cooperatives. Our results indicate trust is correlated with property right and organizational...

A simple model of employment contracting is employed to examine the effectiveness of just-cause provisions in alleviating employer opportunism in two types of efficiency wage contracts-standard contracts, in which wages exceed the worker's marginal contribution, and deferred wages, which are...