As consumer preferences rapidly evolve with respect to health-related attributes of food, many have questioned the performance of the conventional food industry to fulfill new demand. As the structure of the industry has shifted toward conditions where retailers have access to and incentive to...

The adoption of organic agriculture or livestock involves risk and uncertainty, and to overcome this, well designed schemes are required. Are the current support measures attractive for farmers who wish to convert to organic? At first, this study tries to assess the optimal investment trigger...

Innovation and new technology adoption represent two central elements for the enterprise and industry development process in agriculture. The objective of this paper is to develop a farm-household model able to simulate the impacts of uncertainty in SFP, the selling price of energy and...

Innovation and new technology adoption represent two central elements for the business and industry development process in agriculture. One of the most relevant innovations in dairy farms is the robotisation of the milking process through the adoption of Automatic Milking Systems (AMS). The...

Despite the economic damage inflicted by a foodborne disease outbreak, firms at all points in the supply chain appear to be reluctant to invest in the necessary food safety technologies and practices. We argue that these investments are subject to both hysteretic and public good effects, and...

The attractiveness of agricultural land available in developing countries has markedly increased in the last few years. Driven by rising and highly volatile prices for agricul- tural commodities, large land acquisitions have been undertaken by foreign investors. We formalize the discussion...

Innovation and new technology adoption represent two central elements for the enterprise and industry development process in agriculture. The objective of the paper is to provide an ex-ante analysis of the effectiveness of alternative policy design options concerning the RDP measures intended to...

The Dixit entry/exit real option model was applied to the entry/exit decisions of New York dairy farmers. For the cost structure of a 500-cow farm the entry milk price is $17.52 per hundredweight (cwt.) and the exit milk price is $10.84. For the 50-cow farm cost structure the entry price is...

This paper examines the impact of technical efficiency on the optimal exit timing of farms in a stochastic dynamic framework. Starting from a standard real options approach, we incorporate technical efficiency via a production function and derive an optimal price trigger at which farms...

The objective of this paper is to explore the potential of the real options approach for analyzing farmers’ choice to switch from conventional to organic farming. Understanding the determinants of this decision is relevant in particular for agricultural policy makers when predicting the...