A principal-agent approach is used to address issues of environmental risk sharing within a firm. The principal (top management), fearing penalties for environmental damages, wants to avoid environmental harm and induce the agent (employee manipulating hazardous materials) to take appropriate...

Recent instances of significant food safety breeches in both meat and biotechnology challenge traditional safety efforts. A formal model utilizing agency theory is used to explore the power relationships between the regulator and the firm. Fundamental issues effecting firms' supply of safety are...

Soybeans are one of the most valuable crops in the world and are characterized by their multi-purpose uses: food, feed, fuel and other industrial usages such as paint, inks, and plastics. Out of 183.9 million tons of world supply/demand of soybeans in 2001-03 year, about 10% of them were...

An industry's legitimacy depends on stakeholders' perceptions and assessments of the appropriateness of its behavior across a wide array of settings. While products and services may be highly valued, and in some cases essential, business externalities serve as a powerful counterforce undermining...

Firms within the food supply chain must decide what information to provide and how to provide it. This applies to collecting information from upstream suppliers as well as to supplying information to downstream customers. Components of this vertical information situation include farmer supplier...

The protection of intellectual property rights has been a contentious issue over the last 20 years. Industrialized nations have moved to knowledge-based economies and simultaneously trade barriers have fallen, making intellectual property vulnerable. Adding to this vulnerability are conflicting...

Structural change in US agriculture has disrupted the traditional organization of the supply chain. Not only does the scale increase of firms common during the industrial period (1970-1995) continue, but also with the rise of a knowledge-based economy, new organizational forms and supply chain...

A spatial hedonic model is developed to assess monetary harm of confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs) on property values, taking explicitly spatial dependence in property values into account. Spatial autocorrelation was found in the form of spatial lag dependence, not spatial error...

Controversy surrounding confined animal feeding operations (CAFO) is becoming more commonplace. In several regions of the country CAFOs and local residents have had disputes over odors emanating from these operations. Viewing the CAFO as jointly producing products with utility (e.g., meat) and...