In this paper we show that sorting different ability contestants in piece rate tournaments into more homogeneous groups alters incentives for agents to exert effort. In particular we show that for a given mean of the tournament group's ability parameters, larger variance (more heterogeneous...

Previous research has found that a significant part of risk from poultry grow-out farm operations is due to market price of broilers. This risk is transferred to the integrator when the grower enters a production contract with the integrator. This follows from the absence of a market price...

In this paper we propose a game-theoretic model of a rank-order tournament with private information and characterize its equilibrium solution. The model captures many important features of the production contracts once observed in the poultry industry. We use the contract settlement data from a...

The paper develops an adaptive model of perishable commodity dissipation based on the individual's price expectations and risk perception. A two-step, state-space procedure for modeling nonstationary time series is presented. The method combines an impulse response model for estimating...