The rise of contract farming and vertical integration is one of the most important changes in modern agriculture. Yet the adoption and diffusion of these new forms of organization has varied widely across regions, commodities, or farm types, however. Transaction cost theories and the like are...

Achieving consistency in hog quality has been one of the greatest challenges in the US pork industry. Packers, processors and retailers all ranked lack of uniformity in live hogs, carcasses, and retail cuts with regard to size and backfat as the most important quality issue facing the industry...

The idea that individuals adapt their behaviors in response to changes in incentive systems is fundamental to most economic analysis. This paper incorporates the concept of price discovery costs into the incentive theory to offer a theoretical model and empirical evidence on thedifferential...