Advances in the genetic modification of agricultural seeds have allowed a range of new opportunities for manipulating seed traits according to production, market and environmental concerns. As seed varieties continue to become increasingly differentiated, preferences for specific seed traits may...

We examine contracts used in the North American sugarbeet industry. Though quite similar in many respects, the contracts we study vary across processing firms in the set of quality measures used to condition contract payments to growers. This is somewhat surprising given the homogeneous nature...

Market structure and strategic pricing for leading brands sold by Coca Cola and Pepsi Inc. are investigated in the context of a flexible demand specification and structural price equations. This approach is more general than prior studies that rely upon linear approximations and interactions of...

This paper presents an econometric analysis of the effects of price support program and stocks on price dynamics and price volatility. Considering a price support program as a censoring scheme, market prices are specified as a dynamic Tobit model under time varying volatility. The model is...

Vertical coordination in agriculture is a complex problem. Coordination arrangements have both technical and organizational dimensions. This paper calls attention to the institutional dimensions of vertical coordination. It applies concepts of institutional economics to vertical coordination...

We employ a vertical differentiation model to examine the potential bias in pricing-to-market (PTM) results when using unit values aggregating differentiated products. Our results show that: i) false evidence of PTM (“pseudo PTM”) is always found when using unit values, whether the law of...

We develop a reduced-form model of price transmission in a vertical sector, allowing for refined asymmetric, contemporaneous and lagged, own and cross price effects. The model is used to analyze wholesale-retail price dynamics in the US butter market. The analysis provides strong evidence of...