This dissertation comprises three essays that study online demand coming from local offline markets. In the first essay, I study two social influence effects reflected in physical proximity and in demographic similarity, respectively, on online demand evolution. As these effects can be...

Cooperative business firms are prevalent in agribusiness, yet no concise generalizedmodel exists to demonstrate how and why cooperative firms differ from, and may beselected over, the more common investor owned business firm. It is shown within ageneric transaction game that cooperatives fill...

My thesis consists of three essays that investigate strategic interactions between individuals engaging in risky collective action in uncertain environments. The first essay analyzes a broad class of incomplete information coordination games with a wide range of applications in economics and...

The study examines cattle keeping households’ preferences for phenotypic cattle traits in trypanosomosis prevalent production systems of Kenya and Ethiopia, using cross-sectional choice experiment survey data of 508 households. The data was collected between September 2004 and May 2005....

Covers conditions under which public-sector policies, programs, and projects succeed in enhancing the economic activities of poorer groups and micro-regions in developing countries. Topics include local economic development; small enterprises; various forms of collective action; labor and worker...

Development literature has recently promoted the use of producer organization in linking farmers to better-paying commodity markets. However, empirical studies find mixed performance of such organizations. This study examines the producer organization’s internal factors that may explain the...

Institutional problems and the corruptive use of social capital give ground for misuse ofinstitutional gaps and cause intentional failures for financial benefits. Based on socialcapital theory and transaction cost economics (TCE) this paper describes how theinstitutional environment in the...

Objective of this paper is to analyse themotivations in the purchase of Fair Trade (FT) foodproducts sold in the World Shops (WS) in order tocharacterize WS consumer profiles according to theethical content of their motivations. A questionnaire hasbeen distributed, at this end, to a sample of...

Social Network Capital and Academic Careers: The Case of a College of AgricultureABSTRACT The relationship between economic performance and various forms of capital anchors a significant portion of mainstream economic theory and applied economics. Human, physical and financial capital represent...

An income inequality has been expanded in Japan and some policy is highly needed to revitalize rural areas. This study aims to show causative factors on regional satisfaction level by the estimation of the structural equation model (SEM) with data of each town in Yamagata and Yamaguchi...