This paper has two goals. First, we demonstrate that standard arguments and methods from production and duality analysis can be used to provide a comprehensive and general treatment of the value of information for a risk-averse firm with expected-utility (linear-in-probabilities) preferences and...

Quiggin and Chambers have introduced the notion of invariant preferences, and shown that the only invariant expected-utility functionals are those associated with a quadratic utility function. This note identifies the class of preferences which simultaneously satisfy invariance, two-fund...

In a stochastic decision environment, differences in information can lead rational decision makers facing the same stochastic technology and the same markets to make different production choices. Efficiency and productivity measurement in such a setting can be seriously and systematically biased...

Optimal producer behavior in the presence of area-yield insurance is studied. The producer's optimal production and insurance choices are characterized. The effect of the provision of area-yield insurance on production patterns is studied, and sufficient conditions for the provision of...

The state-contingent properties of the most frequently used representations of stochastic production in the agricultural-economics literature are examined. Particular attention is paid to the cases of multiplicative uncertainty, additive uncertainty, and the Just-Pope production function....

A state-contingent model of production under uncertainty is developed and compared with more traditional models of production under uncertainty. Producer behavior with both production and price risk, in the presence and in the absence of futures and forward markets, is analyzed in this...

Insurance contracts are frequently modelled as principal–agent relationships. The purpose of this paper is to examine the interaction between differential bargaining power and the efficiency of insurance contracts. The analysis is undertaken in a framework of state-contingent production, which...

Standard tools for the analysis of economic problems involving uncertainty, including risk premiums, certainty equivalents and the notions of absolute and relative risk aversion, are developed without making specific assumptions on functional form beyond the basic requirements of monotonicity,...

A decomposition of input adjustments for stochastic technologies is developed and applied to the case of actuarially fair production insurance. The decomposition consists of a pure-risk effect and an expansion effect which are analogous to the Hicks-Allen decomposition familiar from consumer...

This note shows that, under appropriate conditions, preferences may be locally approximated by the linear utility or risk-neutral preference functional associated with a local probability transformation. Copyright 2003 by Kluwer Academic Publishers