Proposals for reform of the federal multiple-peril crop insurance program for specialty crops seek to change fees for catastrophic (CAT) insurance from a nominal fifty-dollar per contract registration fee to an actuarially sound premium. Growers argue that this would cause a significant...

Agricultural cooperatives tend to be riskier than investor-oriented firms, both in a business and financial sense. However, cooperative managers are often reluctant to actively manage risk. Although the “risk management irrelevance proposition” suggests that cooperative managers should be...

Product-line length, or variety, is a key competitive tool used by retailers to differentiate themselves from rivals. Theoretical models of price and variety competition suggest that both store and product heterogeneity are key determinants of price and variety strategies, but none test this...

Firms are increasingly using technology to enable targeted, or "personalized" pricing strategies. In settings where prices are transparent to all consumers, however, there is the potential that inter-personal price differences will be perceived as inherently unfair. In response, firms may...

Switching costs are generally regarded as anti-competitive as firms can raise prices to "locked-in" consumers, at least up to the cost of switching to a lower-priced alternative. However, there is some evidence, both theoretical and empirical, that tends to show the opposite. Namely, suppliers,...